


Come the Monsters All

by mugwort_and_myrrh



Series: The Fray Will Well Become Me [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Blood and Violence, Body Dysphoria, Body Horror, Depression, Gender Fuckery, Hydra (Marvel), M/M, Magic, Mildly Dubious Consent, Mind Control, Minor Character Death, Police Brutality, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protests, Suicidal Ideation, ill-advised sex, sorcery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:47:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 21
Words: 182,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25484161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mugwort_and_myrrh/pseuds/mugwort_and_myrrh
Summary: It’s the gunman, the shooter from Steve’s apartment, striding into the open. Black leather and Kevlar and the muzzle across his jaw and that fucking metal arm. And his song is broken, a nightmare—like his soul has been carved out, like they crammed the vessel of his body full of rusty razor blades and landmines, and every time he moves he’s cutting himself deeper.Steve Rogers is—look, he’s fine. He’s busy: neck-deep in spies, pulling the long con where he pretends to be Captain America, SHIELD agent, and not a pack of wolves and six kinds of trauma piled up inside a trench coat. Because the end of the world is coming and he needs allies; this tiny blue-green planet needs a shield, only—Only it turns out he’s not the only one playing the long game inside SHIELD. Hydra are not as dead as the history books would have you believe.And neither is Bucky Barnes.A wolf age, a wind age. Shields are sundered.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: The Fray Will Well Become Me [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/904098
Comments: 871
Kudos: 585





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Two years, a couple apocalypses, and 172,000 words of fiction later: here we go.
> 
> This is the fourth arc in the Magic Pixie Dream Steve series. If you’re not sure how you got here or what is going on, maybe consider reading the first few stories to make sense of it all.
> 
> (If you’re going in regardless, because I’m not the boss of you, the essence of what you should know is: Steve Rogers is secretly a shapeshifting sorcerer, Loki is secretly his dad, and everything you thought you knew about Erskine’s serum / the Second World War / the events of the Battle of New York is a tissue of lies. With a queer love story, lots of catastrophic psychological scarring, and some genderfuck thrown in for spice.)
> 
> Complete work, posting one chapter each week. It will likely be sometime Thursday-through-Saturday-ish, depending on my work shift pattern, the phase of the moon, Mercury retrograde, etc.
> 
> As ever, showers of adulation and love to my heroic beta readers, who have ploughed through a fuck load of text and feelings to help get us here. Chantelle, Jacqui, Liz and Julie, you’re all queens.
> 
> *******
> 
> **Real fucking earnest content warning here, for the love of God:**
> 
> I started writing this beast in 2018, and in seeking to write a North American political climate that had been fundamentally tainted by Hydra, I drew threads of story from our own Darkest of Timelines and welded them to some of the darker elements from Marvel’s universe.
> 
> In short: I accidentally wrote prophecy for the political landscape of 2020.
> 
> There are plot threads here around political protest, around police violence, around fascists infiltrating every level of government. The police murder of BIPOC, and the campaign of protests in response, is a plot point and theme running in the background, and although the police brutality is discussed it doesn’t happen onscreen.
> 
> The main story is Hydra (who are both feeding into and benefiting from this climate of ambient fascism), because the narrator for this particular story is Steve Rogers, and Hydra is his great white (supremacist) whale. But police brutality, and the protest movements of BIPOC, are a major subplot that brackets the beginning and end of the story. If you’re reading fanfic to escape from the white supremacist fuckery of the real world, this is maybe not the fic for you—but I promise, in this universe the Nazis go to jail, not to the White House.
> 
> I wrote this as a piece of wish-fulfilment, wanting to reflect a timeline where BIPOC protest movements save the world and fascists all have really fucking bad days. And I absolutely do not want to re-traumatise BIPOC if you are already tender or bleeding, so please: if you're going in, go in warned, and take care of yourselves.
> 
> Black lives matter.
> 
> *******
> 
> FINAL NOTE before we dive in: 
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has been reading, rereading, commenting and reccing and sending love to the other works in this series. I haven't been replying to comments in the last year because my discipline is for shit, and if I started looking back I was going to lose traction on the arc of the story I was trying to write--it has taken every bit of my concentration and mojo to get us here, completed work, posting.
> 
> Please be assured I read every single comment and shrieked with evil glee at every word. Y'all inspire the Hell out of me and your ongoing faith--after two years with no new material being posted--has warmed the cockles of my cold black heart.
> 
> Here we gooooooo~!

It’s 11pm on January 16th, T minus four days until Justin fuckin’ Hammer is gonna be sworn in as President of the United fuckin’ States, and Steve is crouched on a fire escape overlooking an alley, dumpsters below wafting up the stink of wet cardboard and mouldy cinnamon rolls, watching a couple idiots in ski masks trying to break into an electronics store.

He’s been watching, veiled and invisible, for a good ten minutes now—they’ve got a regular Stooges routine going on down there. Tall Idiot spent most of that time trying to pick the lock by hand, like he thinks he’s some kinda master criminal in a heist movie, and when that fails they have a brief whispered argument.

Steve can’t hear what they’re saying; he’s in his real body, his little body, and his ears aren’t that sharp. He can hear the shuddering notes in their voices, breathless with tension.

And then Wide Idiot throws his hands up, goes back to the van they’ve wedged into the alley, and grabs a crowbar.

Swings for the security glass and— _crunch_ , it’s buckling, bowing in, squares and diamonds in fractal fracture-lines through the glass. He lines up to swing again and—okay, time to cut into this dance.

Steve ducks his head under the railing of the fire escape, grabs the edge with one hand and vaults forward, swings and lands on the ground, sneakered feet catching at the asphalt. Prowls forward as Wide Idiot swings again— _crunch_ , and Steve can hear the tinkle of glass shards hitting the concrete of the step, and he’s pulling up a good couple handfuls of the fire of making from the well in his pelvis as he walks, weaving the illusion spell and—

Pulls the seeming up and through, dropping his veil in the same breath—appears outta nowhere, wreathed in coils of ink-black darkness.

“Evening, fellas,” he says, stirring the seeming behind him so it swirls, writhes, pulsing tendrils of shadow curling around him, over his head. He’s in his real body, his close-fitting greys and blacks, hood of his sweatshirt up and enough of a seeming painted across his face to hide his features in shadow, but leave his wolf eyes gleaming outta the dark.

“What the fuck?” says Tall Idiot, grabbing out the handgun he’s got holstered in the back of his pants—because it is fuckin’ amateur hour here tonight—and Wide Idiot turns, looks around from the door, finds Steve and—

“Fuck me, it’s the Grey Ghost,” Wide Idiot says, crowbar falling limply to his side.

“What ghost?” Tall Idiot asks, pointing his gun at Steve.

“Gonna ask you _once_ to put the gun down and rethink your life choices,” Steve says, cocking his head to the side and watching that gun really Goddamn close, working the fingers of his left hand through the conjuring gestures as he pulls up some more power, weaves the hex—

“Back the fuck off,” Tall Idiot says, gesturing with the gun, and Steve throws the hex, a smooth and easy underhand motion. There’s a soft plasticky _pop_ of something snapping and then the cartridge falls out of the gun, hits the concrete. Bullets ring softly as they scatter, drip down the concrete steps and onto the alley floor.

“Oh no, _fuck_ no,” Wide Idiot says, dropping the crowbar and shoving past the other guy, down the steps, backtracking towards the van. “Ja— _dude_ , come on. This asshole is like—fuckin’ Daredevil dropping LSD.”

Steve has to bite back a grin—he’s been called a lotta things since he started this gig, but that’s gotta be the best so far. Make a note: he’s gotta text Matt, tell him his reputation with street-level mooks has spread as far as D.C.—

“What the shit?” Tall Idiot asks, lifting up the gun and—more pieces of metal and plastic are falling off, sheering away to clatter down the stairs.

“You know this is like, a Mom and Pop kinda business?” Steve says, pointing at the back of the store. “They’re not even a chain. You’re not even sticking it to the man, here. Go rob a Best Buy.”

Wide Idiot is climbing into the van, door half open as he fumbles with the keys, and Tall Idiot drops what’s left of his gun, bends and snatches up the crowbar.

“Go to Hell, freak show,” Tall Idiot snarls, dropping from the stairs to the alley floor and starting forward—yeah, that’s more what Steve usually hears—hefting the crowbar up and—

Steve brings his open right hand into a fist and _pulls_ on the shadow-seeming wreathed around him. A chorus of growls and snarls echoes down the alley, and the shadows coalesce into shapes, bared teeth and claws, black as ink and writhing like smoke, wolves as big as fucking ponies oozing forward and—

“ _Oh fuck_ ,” Tall Idiot says, small and thin, staggering to a stop and stumbling and starting to turn and Steve steps in, smooth, catches the mook by the right arm—weapon arm—and pinches down hard on the nerve cluster in his forearm. Hand spasms—crowbar hits the asphalt—

Roar of an engine and—holy fuck _headlights_ —the van is ploughing straight at him, at them, fastest way outta here—

—and Steve’s grabbing his idiot by the hoodie and hauling, throwing them both to the side, slamming shoulder-first into the brick wall, side of the building, and the van howls past, reek of gas exhaust and burning tires—

And gone, back out on the street. He’s driven square through Steve’s illusion and it’s dissolving, shattering into ribbons of grey and gold light. There’s a ringing silence. Steve can smell piss, acrid and sudden.

“What the fuck?” Tall Idiot asks, blinking and watching Steve’s wolves fall apart like spun sugar in the rain, and Steve sucker punches the guy hard has he can in the nuts. Grabs him by the throat of his sweatshirt and reefs the guy head-first into the metal stair-railing— _ring_ of metal and bone and the guy’s sagging, limp as cooked spaghetti, folding to fall dead-weight on the alley floor.

Still for a couple heartbeats. Steve breathes out, shakes out his hands—ache bone-deep in the right from conjuring and then socking the guy in the junk, which—Christ. Christ, the backs of his knuckles are damp, smell of— _ugh_. “God, pal, _why_ ,” Steve asks, poking the guy with his toe.

Doesn’t get an answer.

He zip-ties the mook to the metal railing. Fishes in the guy’s pockets until he finds a cellphone, dials 911 and leaves it ringing in the guy’s lap. Conjures a walking veil and heads for the street.

*******

It’s a quiet night—the one robbery, another dumb kid stealing a car—and Steve calls it quits and starts winding his way home through Dupont Circle sometime after two in the morning. T minus _three_ fuckin’ days until Justin Hammer gets sworn in as President, and may the Lord have mercy on our souls.

Steve is older than dirt. Okay, do the math—he’s 96 years old. And only Christ knows how much longer he’s got, between the Jotun half of his family tree, the decades in the ice, all the shapeshifting, that time his lunatic father fed him half an Apple of Idunn back when Steve was a dumb kid in Brooklyn.

Point is, Steve’s been around long enough to see the world turn once or twice. He learned geopolitics at the knee of a thousand-some-year-old sorcerer prince. And yet he’s got no fucking explanation for the state of American politics right now.

There are still half-torn posters on the street lights, advertising the protest that happened last weekend. Still scars through the city, smashed shop fronts, places Steve can smell lingering traces of teargas when he passes through in his Cap shape. It’s a clusterfuck, it’s a powder keg, waves of protest and counter-protest, but—but it’s the _will of the people_ , reflected in the polling booths, in stats and graphs, the final results three days after the general election—

There was an FBI investigation, quietly but urgently, because—because no one saw this coming. Hammer is an outsider, ran as an independent, doesn’t hold to either wing of politics, only started dabbling in political circles after he got in cozy with Senator Stern at the hearings about Tony’s Iron Man suit, maybe three years back.

So, investigations. Six states held recounts. No one has found anything funky, so—so Justin Hammer, billionaire arms dealer— _new technologies entrepreneur_ , he’s billing himself now—with about as much political experience as a grade school class president nominee, is taking the Oval Office and—it’s all legal. Apparently. Very legal.

Steve’s turning up Church Street, passing St Luke’s—he’s lived in D.C. for almost two years now. Transferred when SHIELD asked him to, toeing the line and working ops and buying their trust with his blood and sweat because he needs them.

Needs access to resources and soldiers, global reach; needs the world to be ready when the Titan Thanos and his armies come—tomorrow, or next week, or in another century or two. Not that he can tell anybody about that part. Not without revealing his sources.

So he’ll play the long game. He’ll be SHIELD’s company man. What the Hell else can he do?

Turning again and—home is up ahead. Blue-grey brick, third floor apartment, with parking for his bike. And he sweeps the place for bugs by hand twice a week, Monday and Friday, regular as clockwork: groceries, work, vigilantism, jogging, check entire living space for surveillance equipment planted by the paramilitary spy organisation that he works for. Rinse and repeat.

SHIELD still have no Goddamn idea what he is, who he is. What he can do: his sorcery, his _seidhr_. And the longer he spends in their guts, in the belly of the beast, the more convinced he is that he made the right call: SHIELD doesn’t have a good track record of dealing with the enhanced, people with extra-human biology or freak show party tricks like Steve’s.

He’s not gonna give them the rope they use to hang him. Has no intention of being turned into a science project for the rest of his Christ-knows-how-long life.

Home and—he cuts down the side alley to the base of the fire escape, finds the toe holes he cut into the surface of the brick when he first moved into the place. Cat-climbs up to the cage of the fire escape and hauls himself over the rail, onto the landing, smooth and practiced.

He’s been Ghosting since before he moved to D.C., because Jesus Christ Almighty knows he needed something to do at nights when he’s abjectly failing to sleep, so he’s got this whole thing—coming and going, all hours, unseen—down to an art form.

Climb the stairs of the fire escape—his veil smothers the sounds of his feet falling, landing, but the whole structure is one big metal bell, ringing and vibrating all the Goddamn way up the building, so he’s gotta creep like a cat burglar. Up to the third floor, to the window he leaves unlocked, and—

Steve is halfway in through the window, one foot on the fire escape and one pointed-toe groping for the floor inside, when he hears some asshole pounding at his front door.

He’s frozen for a hiccuping half-second, and then heaves himself forward and inside, hauls the window closed and the blind down. Drops his walking veil and yells, “Hang on, I’m coming.”

The pounding at the door dribbles to a stop—okay, shit, he’s gotta—

There are Cap clothes sitting folded on the sofa, ready. He tears off his Grey Ghost clothes and kicks them under the couch, rips the tie out of the knot of hair at the back of his head and shakes it out—he’s got his hair shoulder length, at the moment, with a patch buzzed Marine-short in the back, because social camouflage goes a long way.

Veils can fall apart at _fucking inconvenient times,_ but if he keeps moving fast enough he can pass for a skinny hipster, forearms tattooed with wing feathers and body-modded with whirling scarification. Looking like a hipster is better than looking like a fucking monster—the scars, the feathers, the fangs, the _eyes_.

Hums a couple bars of _Star Spangled Man,_ hauling power up and through his body, shaping it with quick twists of his hands and then shoving the shapeshifting spell out and through and—and he grits out, “Oh Christ, _fuck_ ,” as the shift happens, rending pain lancing through his tissue and meat and bones as his body changes.

However much his real body distorts itself, reshaping itself with the force and flow of his sorcery, the Cap shape is a constant, immediately recognisable, pin-up pretty fucking face and inflatable biceps, and he’s staggering as he stacks on a foot and some in height and a hundred and thirty pounds of muscle in the space of a few seconds.

Half-falls against the sofa and then snatches up the T-shirt and—and the pounding at the front door stopped for maybe ten seconds but it’s started up again, not as loud now but steady and urgent.

“Keep your shirt on,” Steve hollers, arms up and reefing his own shirt on—soft pop of stitches tearing—and then steps into the jeans and starts for the door, tugging and pulling and fixing the fly and snatching up his shield from its spot next to the hall closet because his Mam didn’t raise a fool. He’s holding the shield up to protect his centre mass when he has a quick look through the peephole and—

It’s Sam. It’s Sam Wilson and—and some lady: white, older—like maybe in her fifties—blasted sick-pale and shrunk in on herself like she’s trying to turn herself inside out, a shirt pocket in the wash, and—and it’s Sam hammering at the door, and keeping watch back down the hall, like—

Like something might be coming after ‘em. Something, someone.

Steve lowers the shield and opens the door, because Sam is… if Steve weren’t neck deep in secrets and lies, if he could actually be fucking real with anyone, Sam would be it. He’s good people.

The story of how Steve met Sam Wilson starts—

It’s maybe nine months ago and he’s coming off the gun range in the basement of SHIELD’s D.C. headquarters—the Triskelion, they call it, this enormous building, a vast three-faced monument to the power of state secrets wed to guns. He’s putting the practice Glock back in the weapons safe, earmuffs hung around his neck, when he registers movement from the corner of his eye, over by the door.

It’s not quite five in the morning—Steve was out most of the night Ghosting, got back to his apartment at three and shifted over to his Cap shape—and then the usual surge of new energy, wired like he’s just had twelve shots of espresso mainlined straight into his jugular vein.

Went quietly batshit crazy, bouncing off the walls. Came down to the Triskelion after about an hour of doing one-armed pushups and rearranging his bookshelf and finally conceding that there was no Goddamn way he was gonna sleep tonight.

So it’s early, and he’s usually the only one here at this hour but—there’s a fella over by the exit door, leant against the wall and watching Steve, arms crossed and eyes half lidded. He’s black, solidly built, clean-shaved scalp, jacket and jeans and SHIELD-issue combat boots, and he looks—vaguely familiar, like maybe Steve’s met him in passing someplace but—but that can’t be right. He’s got an eidetic memory, and this guy—

“Help you?” Steve asks, closing the safe and lifting the ear protectors from around his neck.

“I don’t know,” the guy answers, straightening up and stepping forward, slow and casual. “I got a feeling we may be able to help each other.” He stops in front of Steve, stands square, puts a hand out to shake.

“My name is Antoine Triplett,” he says. “I’m a combat specialist with Covert Ops. My grandfather was Gabriel Jones.”

Steve—stares, frozen, for a good couple seconds, seeing it: the slope of his nose, shape of his lower lip, the particular flecks of brown and black and amber in his eyes—Private Gabe Jones of the Howling Commandos, his bloodline, keen intelligence and sly sense of humour and—“Holy shit,” Steve says, and shakes the guy’s hand.

They all had lives, his Commandos, after Steve put the _Valkyrie_ down in the ice: long lives or short lives, busy lives, sweet and bitter and human. Had careers and families and—and he knows there are kids and grandkids and great-grandkids running around but he’s not looked ‘em up, not met any of them. He’s always felt like it would be… too Goddamn intrusive, to invite himself into strangers’ lives like his relationships with dead people most of a century ago gives him any right to be there. So this is…

“Holy shit,” Steve says again, like some kinda asshole, and then: “Sorry. God, I see the resemblance. Good to meet you, Antoine.”

“Call me Trip,” the guys says, and ten minutes later they’re both sitting down on the benches in the locker room next door and Trip’s got his phone out cueing up a clip from ARE News last night.

“Do you watch ARE at all?” Trip asks, hovering over the play button with his thumb, and Steve shakes his head.

“It was costing me too much in furniture and drywall,” Steve says, level and dry as a salt flat, and Trip huffs a noise that’s not quite a laugh. ARE is cable media, and they’re fiscally and socially as conservative as you can get without suggesting we set the homeless on fire as a cost-cutting measure.

They’re also the main news source for something like 40% of the U.S. population, and every time he remembers that bit of fucking trivia, Steve feels _every one_ of his ninety six years.

“And you’re not on social media anymore, are you? Not after…”

“After I called the Director of the CIA a thinly-veiled fascist,” Steve says.

Steve had a Twitter account for a total of five days before Fascist-Gate happened and the PR whizz kids at SHIELD took it off him again. Now it’s managed by some dame he’s never met, who uses it to post up photos from when Captain America visits a hospital or cuts the ribbon at a new V.A. building. Nothing real.

“Okay,” Trip says, and then he thumbs the play button on the phone and—

It’s a segment about the BAST protest that happened last weekend in Detroit, clips of a sea of black and brown faces with hand-painted signs, commentary droning over the top—“Close to five thousand angry protestors filled the streets, blocking traffic and bringing the city to a standstill—”

“It was closer to eleven thousand,” Trip murmurs.

BAST are Black America Speaks Truth, and this was their third major protest—biggest so far—since they started organising six months ago. Since the death—the murder: Jesus, call it what it is—of Gracie Maxwell, fourteen years old and black and screaming and trying to get to her father, being arrested, by the side of a road in New Orleans.

The cop who— _thought she was attacking him_ , is what this asshole insists, anyway—the cop who shot her was using a ViceStar 400, brand-spanking-new military-grade HammerTech gun, rolled out to domestic police in the aftermath of the Chitauri invasion.

The shot—her shoulder—she died at the scene. This kid. She died at the scene, and BAST rose up out of the cracks in the pavement like floodwater, like the tide, in the weeks that followed.

They protest to demonstrate two truths that really Goddamn oughta be self-evident. First off: cops have zero business using military-grade tech for civilian arrests. And for seconds: since the rollout of the HammerTech weapons, police have killed _exactly fucking zero_ invading aliens, and a little over eight hundred American citizens. Most of ‘em black, or brown, or Native American. Most of ‘em too Goddamn young.

The ARE segment is the usual screed—complaints about the impact of the protest on city traffic, commentary about the crime rate in Detroit over that weekend—implying that the protestors mighta all turned to petty theft after they put their placards down—and then the usual platitudes—

“Law-abiding citizens have no reason to be _frightened_ of a well-armed police force,” the commenter says, and the clip flashes to—oh, _shit_.

It’s video of _Steve_ , in his Cap uniform, smiling and shaking hands with a trio of cops—must be from after the Battle of New York, that ceremony to thank all the first responders.

Flashes back to—the ARE studio, the anchors, smug and sleek as pedigreed cats: “Arming our police officers with the best equipment available means we’re all safer,” the fella on the right says. "The only people who need to be concerned about our first responders having the best equipment, the best weapons to do their jobs—well, those guys are the criminals.”

The fella on the left chuckles, greasy and grandfatherly, and Steve takes a deep fucking breath and Trip switches off the phone, shoves it in his pocket.

It’s silent for a moment, and then: “They didn’t actually _say_ —” Trip begins.

“Not in so many words,” Steve says. “They didn’t _say_ that _I_ approve of badly-trained racist cops killing people with military-grade weapons. They just put my Goddamn face on screen while _they_ approved of it.”

“That’s about the shape of it,” Trip agrees.

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Steve says, and then he gets up, paces the length of the locker room, staring at the tiled walls like they said somethin’ nasty about his Mam. Puts a fist to his chest and centres his shit. Breathes.

Turns back to face Trip. “Say, you wouldn’t know how to get in touch with one of the BAST organisers, would you?” Steve asks.

Trip straightens, eyes flashing wider, baring teeth in a grin. “Funny you should ask that,” he says.

Two weeks later Steve is decked out in a BAST T-shirt, Captain America shield in its harness strapped real visible to his back, in the middle of a seven thousand-strong protest outside HammerTech’s offices in Manhattan.

This is not Steve’s first rodeo—he used to ride on his Mam’s shoulders when she was picketing in support of workers outside of factories, four and five years old. But this is the first protest he’s been to as Captain Steven Rogers, as Captain America, and—the news cameras are fixated like he’s stuffed with fucking catnip.

Which is the point of the exercise—get attention, draw awareness to the cause, to the protest, what these folks are actually trying to achieve here. He’s weaving through the crowd to stay ahead of the journalists, playing cat and mouse with ‘em, and every now and then he’ll let himself get caught and—

“Captain Rogers,” the reporter is asking, yelling to be heard over the chant running through the crowd—

“ _Disarm—disarm—disarm—disarm_ —”

“Captain Rogers, are you here in support of the protesters today?” the reporter asks, like Steve’s not wearing a BAST T-shirt with a collage of photos of murdered civilians across his chest, like his sympathies are not crystal fucking clear, and shoves the microphone in Steve’s face to catch his answer—

“I just happened to be here,” Steve says, blandly. “Sure is good to see this kinda passionate civic engagement. America’s democracy is strong enough to hold a lotta different opinions under the one umbrella. Say, have you met my friend here—” and he does a half turn and slithers away just as the organiser hovering at his elbow slithers into his place—they’re easy to find in the crowd, black caps and armbands.

And then Steve’s gone, disappearing into the press of people as the organiser—it’s a lady this time, stocky and glasses, her curly hair knotted up in a confection of scarves—launches into the BAST elevator pitch for the camera.

It’s smooth, a fluid dance—and Jesus Christ but Steve hates when people pull their phones out and take photos of him buying his Goddamn milk, or sitting on his bike in traffic, but if he’s gotta be that kind of recognisable at least he can use his pretty fucking face for something good.

He’s weaving back through the crowd, press of bodies, looking for his next target: next news crew, next knot of tension at the edges, cops or counter-protesters—

“ _Disarm—disarm_ —”

—and in the heartbeat lull between roars from the crowd he catches a voice, the thread of a voice speaking:

“—some room, I need—”

It’s firm and urgent and Steve’s turning and pushing that way before he’s really thought about it, ducking under a couple signs and pivoting to work around a tight knot of people and the way opens and he’s through and—

It’s—there’s a kid, maybe in his late teens, sat slumped against a lamp post, blood sheeting down his nose and jaw from his forehead, a wound in his forehead, and there’s—the guy speaking is kneeling next to him, pulling latex gloves out of a backpack.

He’s a black guy, maybe in his thirties, grey T-shirt and a goatee, reefing the gloves on and—and the crowd shifts and someone—another guy, tall and lanky, is stepping on the medic’s shin, stumbling—

Steve’s sliding forward, catching him by the collar of his shirt and hauling him back and up before he can fall on ‘em—“Whoa,” the guy says, startled, looking down and back and then—and then he’s facing front again, seeing Steve and—his expression shifts, slides, trace of recognition and then confusion—“Thanks, man,” he says, and then: “I know you from somewhere?”

“I got one of those faces,” Steve says, pats him on the shoulder and ducks past to get to—

The medic guy is gloved up and pressing a folded wad of gauze to the kid’s bleeding head. “You okay?” Steve asks, yelling past the noise of the crowd.

“Head lac,” the medic answers, glancing up at Steve for half a second and then back on the job. “Corner of a sign to the forehead. Scalp wounds always bleed but his pupils are equal and reactive—you’re gonna be okay, man,” he’s saying to the kid, calm registers in his voice, steady as a rock.

His backpack has got the kinda first aid kit you could use to perform an emergency appendectomy on the kitchen table. Not his first rodeo, either.

“How can I help?” Steve asks.

“Just need enough air and daylight to work, keep the crowds off,” the medic says. “Wanna be my human shield?”

“Pal, you’re talking about my specialty,” Steve says, uncoiling to stand at his full height, to expand to the limits of his skin, and the medic looks up again, longer, actually looks at Steve’s face and blinks hard and then grins, blinding, barks a laugh and—

Five hours later they’re sitting in a deli in Harlem, drinking coffee strong enough to strip the mould outta your bathtub and talking, swapping stories.

His name is Sam Wilson, former Air Force, former pararescue. Visiting his Mama in Harlem for the weekend, and—and this is his second BAST protest, operating as a street medic. First time he’s made it out the other side whole and intact—cops confiscated and destroyed his supplies, moved him on with a rain of teargas, last time out. He lives in D.C., works as a counsellor with the V.A. Did two tours in the sandbox and now he’s home, figuring himself out, and—

They fought their wars in different centuries, different parts of the globe, so it’s—when Sam talks about the unique human stink of sweaty fellas crammed into a tent for weeks at a time. About how he found out over Skype that his sister was marrying her girlfriend. About his bed feeling too damn soft now he’s home, used to sleeping on the ground like a caveman.

It’s close enough to shooting the shit with one of Steve’s Commandos that he’s feeling—tight. Squeezed down, pinched up, in his chest.

When they part way out on the street—“You wanna stop by the V.A. sometime, make me look awesome in front of the girl with the coffee cart—you know where to find me,” Sam says, and Steve laughs and says something agreeable and has no Goddamn intention of following through because—

There’s no cure, not for his flavour of crazy. He fought in a world war and did decades of solitary, wide awake in the dark and the cold of the ice. Did a couple more decades as a pack of wolves. He’s a sorcerer and a fairy invert with a rack of ladies clothes hidden behind the racks of safe, boring Da clothes in his closet.

Steve dreams he’s still a wolf and wakes whining and yipping. He feels the first bite of frozen-cold winter air on his skin and has to do centring exercises to keep from losing the Goddamn plot. He took down every mirror in his apartment—had to smash the one in the bathroom and pry it off in chunks, resurface the wall and repaint—because seeing himself unexpectedly is… not okay.

He’s not okay.

SHIELD keep trying to steer him towards therapy. SHIELD have no Goddamn idea.

He can’t _talk_ about any of this shit—his life is secrets piled on secrets, stacked up like a house of cards—so he just… doesn’t.

Doesn’t need to.

He’s not okay, but he’s _doing_ okay.

So there’s no way he’s gonna go down to the V.A.—there is no _support group_ for this kinda nuts—but a couple weeks later he finds himself hovering in the foyer of the V.A. building like some kinda asshole anyway. Which is where Sam finds him, looking constipated and lost—steers him back out the door and down the street to the food truck on the corner.

They eat arepas and churros sitting perched on a low brick wall in the park over the road, and they don’t—there’s no _counselling_ but they just talk—about bullshit, sports teams and pizza toppings, and it’s easy and—

This time when they part ways Steve’s got Sam’s number saved on his cell phone.

They do somethin’ maybe every two or three weeks—depending on Steve’s schedule, if he’s not caught up doing jobs for SHIELD in Guatemala and Belgium and Madripoor. Grab something to eat or have a beer or watch a game on TV—Steve is getting Sam caught up on the subtleties of baseball, and Sam is returning the favour with basketball—or all of the above and just—talk. About whatever. It’s easy.

Sam is good people.

So Steve lowers his shield and opens the door and—

“Look, I’m sorry, man,” Sam says. “I didn’t know where else to go. I think this situation is more your kinda speed than mine.”

“Aliens or Nazis?” Steve asks, stepping back to let ‘em in.

“Hit squads,” Sam says, hand to the older lady’s elbow to send her through first; he’s bringing up the rear, eyes flicking to watch down the corridor again. “Organised bad guys with firepower.”

He slides through and Steve closes the door, throws the deadbolt, and then—it’s not paranoia if you really are wanted by Interpol. He’s had a couple years to siege-proof this apartment—strides back up the hall to the two hundred-odd pound wooden dresser against the wall, grabs it up, one hand underneath and the other over the rear lip and heaves it up onto his shoulder—walks back down and shoves the dresser into place in front of the door.

Turns around and—they’re both watching him. Staring.

Steve dusts his hands off and makes a sheepish face. “So—me and not the cops?”

“No cops,” the lady says, immediate, and her voice is a ruin, shaking, worn to a rasp, but she says it firm as stone. “Not the police. They’re—I think they might be involved.”

Steve looks at Sam, who is—alert, thrumming. Armed: Steve can see the lines of a concealed carry holster at the waistband of his jeans, just above his right hip. Gaze flicking from the door to the windows, watching, watching. Mouth is a flatline, grim.

“Miranda Cobalt,” Sam says, waving a hand at the lady, “Steve Rogers. Miranda’s sister-in-law is Steph Hooper, one of my veterans. She was killed by what _looked_ like cops at a traffic stop two hours ago.”

“Okay,” Steve says, moving the puzzle pieces around in his head, and then, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Cobalt holds a hand up, crosses her arms to hug her elbows like she’s holding herself together at the seams. She’s taking a shuddering breath, taking a minute, and Steve turns and moves back into the living room, double-checks all the blinds are down, sight lines closed off.

“They were after me,” Cobalt says, voice coming out dead, drained. She’s stood in the middle of the living room, still curled in on herself like a wounded animal protecting her belly. “I got away—had to hit one of them with the car, but—” and she stops, sobs, eyes closing. Another breath and: “I went to Steph because she said she knew someone who knew Captain America. My husband—they’ve already killed Charlie—”

“Who’s Charlie?” Steve asks, and—he can hear—there’s something. A scrape. Metal on concrete. And—a whine, shrill, cutting-high—

“My husband. Charles Cobalt. He’s a medical examiner—he found something in an autopsy last week, something bizarre, and now—he and his supervisor, they’re both dead, and—”

Oh, Jesus Christ. “Does one of you have a cell phone?” Steve interrupts: that electronic shriek, higher than thought. Ears, ears listening—

Cobalt freezes, blanches sick-white, and pulls an iPhone out of her trouser pocket.

There’s—Steve almost doesn’t catch it past the wail of the cell phone, background human noise of living in the city, heartbeats and traffic a couple roads over and someone’s got music playing but he just hears it, just catches—slide of slick metal over metal, quiet and smooth and steady and—

Steve’s moving, throwing himself forward and arms out to snatch Cobalt around the shoulders, take her down to the floor, get ‘em _down_ —

Flat clap of gunfire like a slap to the ears—and the howl of pain, burning red-bright in his left shoulder like someone’s shoved a hot poker into the meat of him and—

And down—on the floor, thud of bodies and bones hitting wood and he’s covering Cobalt, his body over hers—reek of blood and hot metal in his nose—

He’s been shot. They’ve been shot—went through the muscle, very top of his shoulder, and into her—chest, upper chest, blood welling black onto the navy blue of her blouse, and she’s gone corpse-white, hands fluttering like dying moths, look of confusion and horror on her face.

Godawful heaving whistle in her breath. Jesus fuck, her _lung_.

“ _Sam_ ,” Steve’s yelling, and Sam’s already there—immediate, instinctive, dropping to his knees to shoulder Steve outta the way, hands going to the bullet hole in Cobalt’s chest. Steve lurches up to his feet, turning, feeling his lips pull back from his teeth in a snarl, nostrils flaring, scenting—wolf part of his brain surging up—

There’s a tattered hole in the wall—the sniper shot them _through_ the wall, shot Cobalt through brick and plasterboard and the meat of Steve’s shoulder so—so they’ve gotta be _close_ , close enough to—over to the window and throw the blind to the side and see—

—gleam of metal against shadow, moving, on the rooftop next building over—

Steve hefts his shield and runs for the front door—heaves the dresser to the side—crunch of wood going through the plasterboard of the wall and—and throws the door open and—

Movement and he’s bringing his shield up, ready to—flash of gold hair and—it’s Kate, or whatever her name is, the _nurse_ -slash-SHIELD agent who lives downstairs—they installed her a couple weeks after Steve moved in—in boxer shorts and bed hair with a Glock in her right hand, wild-eyed—

“Captain Rogers?” she’s asking, and he’s turning, running because he doesn’t have time for this, the sniper has a head start and—

End of the hall is a window. Steve hits it shield up, running hard—punches through the glass and he’s flying, falling, concrete and sky and streetlight flashing past and— _crash_ and through the window of the building next door, rolling across his shield and coming up, on his feet, glass shards through his clothes, his hair, digging and slicing as he runs—

Steve is the paranoid daughter-son of a paranoid son of a bitch, and he doesn’t sleep a lot at nights, and he’s kinda wanted by at least a couple intelligence organisations for that time he broke his paranoid son of a bitch Da out of an electrified underground prison cell. He’s mapped out at least a dozen ways in and out of his apartment, through the surrounding city block, routes he can take to get to the street or the rooftops in the shortest time, in his real body, in his Cap shape, quietly or like a fuckin’ tank—

He’s in his Cap shape, he’s got his shield. Today is a _fuckin’ tank_ kinda day.

Running and—he’s in an office building, carpet underfoot, brass nameplates on the doors. The sniper was on the rooftop—Steve veers off the wall, bell-note of his shield hitting wood and keep moving—so Steve’s gotta get through _here_ and up, up to—gunman was on the rooftop but he’ll be moving, coming down the stairwell or down the side of the building, moving but—

Moving at human speed. Even with the head start Steve can catch him, is gonna fucking catch him and then—

Through a wall right _here_ —crunch of plaster tearing—he’s mapped it out, a straight cut to the stairwell from here, to—glances up and—

There’s a skylight overhead, glass window up to the rooftop and— _movement_. It’s the sniper—black and metal, dark hair, moving fast.

Jesus, he’s—he’s _more than human_ kinda fast. He’s keeping pace. Fast as Steve. Maybe faster.

Who the fuck is this guy?

End of the roof and—and the sniper should be _stopping_ , end of the road asshole, but he—

Blur of grey and black and he’s gone and—and flash of movement dead ahead, out the window at the end of the hall. He’s jumped, he’s fucking jumped the gap—and down, rolling, next rooftop, building next door—

Holy Mary, Motherfucker, that’s—Steve puts on a burst of speed, finds the next gear—end of the corridor, window, coming up—shield up and head down and—

Hits the window and keeps going, run and leap and _push_ and for a crazy split second he could be bird-shaped, flying, falling outta the sky to strike and land like a hammer— _down_ , still human, fallen from grace, concrete biting the bare skin of his knuckles and feet as he rolls across his shield again, comes up on the rooftop.

Up and on his feet—and the gunman is just _there_ , a straight shot, running hard for the far end of the building and Steve plants himself, coils—arms, shoulders, chest, belly, pulling tight like garrotting wire across a throat and—

—and throws his shield, _hard_ , full pivot of his body, and it flies true, straight and clean as a bullet, as a blade, metal-edged _hum_ of the air parting like the music of the fucking spheres—

And the gunman stops, plants himself like a rock—arm coming up—

—catches the shield like it’s a softball, easy pass, like it’s nothing.

He doesn’t—move with it, turn with it, take the momentum off. He’s solid, arm a straight line and—and his arm is—

His arm is metal. Solid, gleaming, fingertips to shoulder—metal plates fitted together like human flesh, flawless. Steve can hear the bell-tone of vibranium hitting metal, the muted buzz of electronics humming, gleaming parts shifting in harmony. It’s not armour, not like Tony’s armour. This asshole has a Goddamn metal arm welded to his skeleton.

Who the _Christ_ is this guy—dark hair, messy, loose—black leather tac gear, all straps and buckles over muscle—smear of black grease over his eyes, and some kinda mask, tight across his nose and mouth, his jaw. Like you’d muzzle a feral dog.

Frozen for half a heartbeat, staring, and then—and then the sniper twists and heaves—whirr of the robot arm, whatever he’s got in there instead of muscle bunching and tightening and—and _throws_ , shield coming back with interest.

Steve’s got both hands out to catch—edges biting at his palms—he’s braced for it but it still throws him back a couple steps, bare feet grating at the concrete, almost falling on his ass but—

Jesus, this guy is _strong_ —and Steve’s looking back up, looking for—

He’s gone. The gunman, the sniper—the rooftop is empty.

Run forward, for the edge of the roof but—but the street’s empty. He’s gone. Christ, no one human moves that quick.

No one human.

He’s gone and—and _Lord Almighty_ , Steve’s gotta—

He’s got a woman bleeding out from a gunshot wound to the chest on his apartment floor, he’s gotta get back there and—but he’s frozen, half a second, catching—

Catching the last threads of scent. The human stink of sweat and unwashed hair. Gun oil and leather. Hot metal. It’s—the animal part of his brain is taking deep breaths, like—

Feels like he oughta—know something. Remember something, only—

Only he’s got an eidetic memory, and he’s definitely never…

Hefts his shield and turns and puts his head down and runs. Gotta get back, back to his apartment, to—Cobalt needs him, Sam needs him. And Steve needs answers.

Gotta go to work.


	2. Chapter 2

Back to the apartment, to Steve’s apartment, where—

“Stay the Hell back,” Sam is snarling, on his knees next to Miranda Cobalt and—he’s got one hand keeping pressure on her gunshot wound, high on her chest, red seeping up between his fingers. Other hand is holding a gun levelled at not-Kate, the SHIELD agent from downstairs—

She’s hands up, her sidearm in the one hand and pointing up at the ceiling—“Let me help,” she’s saying. “I’m SHIELD, okay, I’m one of the good guys—”

Jesus Christ. It’s been maybe two minutes since Steve threw his front door open and ran off after the sniper.

Feels like it’s been an hour, maybe a decade—because everything has changed.

That gunman, he’s—more than human. Maybe _not from around here_ , maybe enhanced—really enhanced, not a fraud like Steve, so—but it’s only been a couple minutes and Sam and the agent are stood frozen like mannequins in Steve’s living room while Cobalt bleeds out slowly on the floor.

“It’s okay, Sam,” Steve says. “She’s SHIELD. Lives downstairs.” Steve drops his shield on the couch—and Sam is lowering the gun, thumbing the safety on and putting it down neatly on the floor. Not-Kate lets her hands drop.

Steve strides into the kitchen, grabs a stack of clean tea towels out of the bottom drawer, takes ‘em over to Sam. He grabs a couple, wads ‘em and presses down over the wound.

“Outta interest, were you placed here to guard me or to spy on me?” Steve asks the agent, dropping into a crouch next to Sam and Cobalt. Cobalt is—out of it, the colour of wallpaper paste, red smeared over her teeth and tongue and lips from where she’s been breathing blood—

“Goddamnit,” Steve hears the agent breathe, and then she says: “I was assigned to protect you. I’m Agent 13, SHIELD Special Services. What the Hell is happening here?”

“Trying to work that out myself,” Steve says, and then to Sam: “We need to get her to a hospital.”

Sam makes a choked off noise, something like a growl. “She wanted to stay off the grid,” he says. “If we take her to a hospital, they’ll find her.”

“Can you fix this with my first aid kit and your own two hands?” Steve asks, and—

“ _Stay off the grid_? Who _is_ that?” Agent 13 is asking—

“No,” Sam answers Steve, grinding it out. “No, she’ll need—needs a trauma surgeon. Couple units of packed cells—”

“Then we go to the hospital,” Steve says. “And when they come for her there, we deal with it. Now, what do we need to move her safely?”

“Shit,” Sam breathes, and then, “I—if you carry her, I’ll keep pressure on her chest. My car’s out on the street.”

“I’ve called this in to SHIELD,” Agent 13 says, waving her—she’s got a freakin’ shortwave radio. “There’s an ambulance en route, a STRIKE team—”

“We can’t wait around,” Steve says, bending to shove his arms under Cobalt’s neck and knees, scoop her into a bridal carry. Sam moves with him, ends up with one hand over the wound in Cobalt’s chest, the other over the exit wound in her back, squeezing hard, and—and Steve’s pushing up, smooth and careful, onto his feet. “Got a paramedic right here,” he says, nods at Sam, and then starts moving for the door.

It’s graceless, awkward, Sam doing a scrambling sidestep to keep pace and Steve leaving blood red footprints on the wooden floor but they make it work—Agent 13 shoves the front door open, ducks ahead to hit the button for the lift, and when they get to the ground floor she’s the first one out of the lift, gun levelled, making sure the foyer’s clear—

“What is this?” she asks again, as Steve and Sam are shoehorning Cobalt into the backseat of Sam’s car. “Do you know this woman?”

She’s eyes up, holding her gun pointed at the sky, watching the street, alert. Ready for attack, if it comes.

“I know she came to me for help,” Steve says. “I know someone sniped her through my apartment wall. They’re organised, got firepower.”

And enhancements. More than human enhancements—but he doesn’t know that for sure, doesn’t have evidence beyond what he saw in snatched glimpses in the dark. Nothing admissible, nothing solid. “They were using her phone to track her. Name’s Miranda Cobalt.”

“Let’s go,” Sam barks—he’s kinda half-straddled Cobalt in the back of the car, red to his wrists with her blood, keeping that pressure on, relentless.

Steve slams the door and throws himself in the front—“Call SHIELD, ask ‘em to meet us at the hospital,” Steve says to Agent 13—or whatever the Christ her name is—and then he’s starting the car and peeling out and—

It’s not a long drive but—“Where the Hell did you learn to drive?” Sam yells at one point, bracing himself with a foot against the back of Steve’s seat as he’s throwing ‘em around a corner and—

“Nazi Germany,” Steve calls back. “In an Army Humvee. Getting shot at by squids.”

“ _The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want_ —” Sam mutters, which—Jesus, Steve’s driving is not _that_ bad, and then—

Hospital and—

Shouting, doctors yelling instructions and orders, and a couple orderlies are helping Steve heave her up onto a stretcher. “Gunshot wound to the chest. She’s got a haemopneumothorax,” Sam is saying, and he’s still got his hand pressed over the wound on her chest, wadded up tea towel dark with blood, and a nurse snaps on gloves and shoulders him out of the way to take over and—

They’re wheeling her through the ED, through to the rear doors—“Is Resus One open?” one of the doctors calls ahead, and then they’re shoving through the swing doors and—

A nurse steps in the way, hands up, glasses slipping off her nose and—“I have to ask you to wait outside,” she’s saying. “I understand this..." She trails off; her gaze has landed on Steve’s shoulder. “Holy _shit_ , were you _shot_?”

It takes a couple minutes to deflect her—she’s trying to get him to sit down, trying to examine the wound, and—and it’s so much like how his Mam would fuss when he came home with bruises up his legs or blood in his teeth—before he escapes, and then—

And then the resus room, medical team working over Cobalt’s limp body, a count to three before one of the doctors shoves a sharp-ended tube between her ribs into the chest wall, a couple of the nurses priming up a unit of blood and hooking it up to the huge fuck-off IV catheter someone’s put in her neck—

—and then moving again, Steve and Sam trailing after the hospital bed as it’s pushed up and through, x-rays and blood samples drawn off and spirited off and then—

The ICU, finally.

It feels like it’s been half a day at least, but it’s maybe been an hour total from when she hit the floor of Steve’s apartment. From when those bullets first cut straight through woodwork and plaster to find their target.

Jesus Christ, what kind of assassin shoots someone sight unseen through a wall? Was it—could he have used thermal imaging, maybe?

Steve leans against a wall, checks the clock over the nurses’ station. Yeah, it’s 3.45am—less than an hour. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Sam is in the bathroom up the hall—has been for a good ten minutes now, scrubbing Cobalt’s blood from his hands and doing a couple breathing exercises—privacy is kinda nominal when Steve is Cap shaped, hearing everything straight through the walls.

He sighs, rubs at his shoulder—God Almighty, he’s gonna have to find a quiet corner and shift shapes, heal this bullet hole. He’s leaving bloody footprints on the clean grey linoleum, blood tracking right down his torso and jeans to dribble off his bare feet.

And there’s—where the Hell are SHIELD? They’ve been here forty minutes. SHIELD oughta be here by now. If Agent 13 called ‘em. Unless—unless she didn’t. Unless the gunman backtracked and put her down, or— _shit_.

He needs to stay focused. Stay here. Keep Cobalt alive until backup comes, until he can take his hands off the steering wheel.

Desk phone over on the workbench against the far wall. He picks up the receiver and dials SHIELD’s emergency contact line.

*******

The ICU is quiet—machines beeping, nurses moving around, rasping whoosh of ventilated patients breathing—but after gunshots, running and fighting, the shouting and urgency of the ED, this is all kinda relaxing. Stable.

Says something about how much time Steve spent in hospital as a kid, that he’s finding this soothing.

Cobalt is out cold—they’ve jammed a tube down her throat, are feeding her sedatives. Nurses come in and out, calibrate doses on machines, hook up fresh units of blood—she’s having her third, now—and check the levels of blood and gunk in the canister hanging offa Cobalt’s chest tube.

Steve’d used the bathroom after Sam was through, shifted over to his real body—biting down on his forearm to keep from yelping—and then throwing a Cap-sized illusion on over the top. Contorts himself in the cramped space to get his feet into the sink and rinse the worst of the blood off. Now—

Now Sam is sitting in a corner of the hospital room, slumped over, and Steve is propping up a wall next to the door and waiting for SHIELD to get here. The dame he spoke to on the emergency line said there were agents being dispatched, that they were maybe ten minutes away. And that was five minutes ago, so—

“Okay, Sam?” Steve asks, because—Sam is washed pale, grey tones under the brown of his skin, head in his hands.

“Yeah,” Sam answers, automatic, sitting up and dropping his hands, and then: “Nah, that was a lie. I’m not okay, man. I feel like—like I had _one_ job. She almost died and—”

“She’s alive because of you,” Steve says.

“I missed her cell phone,” Sam says. “I screwed the pooch, man.”

“And she got shot in my home, on my watch,” Steve says. “And then you kept her alive. Credit where it’s due, pal.”

Door opening—it’s a nurse, another one, blonde hair in a sloppy topknot and a tiny plastic tray full of syringes in her hand. She—pauses in the doorframe for half a second, eyes darting around the room, reading the mood maybe—“Sorry, gentlemen,” she says, coming in and closing the door behind her. “I need to give the patient some medications.”

“Sure, thanks,” Steve says, shifting his weight to the left a little—away from her, away from any chance she’ll brush up against him, destroy his seeming. Sam nods, looks away, chin resting on his clasped hands.

It’s quiet again—breathy purr of the ventilator, sneaker footfalls as the nurse crosses to the bed, beeping of machines and buzzers from outside.

Sam’s song—this is the first time Steve’s been around Sam and in his real body, been around Sam and not been deaf and dumb and headblind. So this is the first time he’s heard Sam’s song: it’s trumpets and bass guitar, some kinda Gospel harmony, smooth mechanical notes of a round entering the chamber of a gun, and—wind, wind howling, air pressed against the drums of the ears like—like when you’re flying, or falling.

And there’s Cobalt’s song, piano and water moving over rocks. The song of the hospital, electrical purr of machines singing to themselves. The nurse’s song—

The nurse’s song is—Steve has been around nurses a lot, between his Mam, how sick he always was as a kid, the medical tents during the War. And they’re all different, their own people, but there’s a certain—it’s a particular note that shows up in nurses, medical personnel, anyone who spends a lotta time looking after the sick or injured. Sam’s got it. This nurse—she doesn’t have it.

Her song is—rasp of sandpaper, low violin notes, dogs barking, and—and it’s _fast_ , urgent, like she’s—frightened? Anxious? She’s swabbing Cobalt’s IV line, pushing one of the medications through, smooth, and her hands are steady but there’s—her gloves are clinging to the sweat on her palms.

“Hey, wait,” Steve says, and he could be wrong, maybe she’s just new on the job but her scrubs are—they don’t fit her quite right, like—and she’s looking up, looking at him, and she’s wild-eyed, her song _surging_ —

“ _Stop_ ,” Steve says, throwing himself forward, and the nurse— _not_ a nurse, _fuck_ —turns and throws the tray of medications in his face, and—and he’s flinching, instinctive, used needles to the face—

—and his seeming starts to tear at the seams, pulling apart. He’s patching, drawing power up and reweaving his illusion on the fly, and she’s ducking under his outstretched arm, heaving the door open and running, gone—

“Christ,” Steve spits, and then: “Keep her alive,” to Sam—

He’s leapt up, standing over Cobalt, eyes darting between her face and the machine overhead, readout of her vital signs—“On it,” he’s barking, as Steve turns and puts his head down and Goddamn runs.

Can see the not-nurse down the corridor, accelerating hard, head twisted to look back and then ploughing ahead, shoving a doctor outta the way—

“ _Stop her_ ,” Steve yells, and—overhead a blue light starts flashing, alarm bells ringing—Sam’s hit the medical emergency button, which—gotta keep Cobalt alive, priority one’s gotta be human life, but it means a lotta sound and flashing lights and bodies moving to Cobalt’s bedside. Means the assassin is getting lots of cover for her get away.

Can see her—hits the end of the corridor, grabs an emergency exit door and reefs it open and ducks through—

Howling _whoop_ of another alarm, orange lights flashing over the nurse’s station—Jesus, she’s triggered the fire alarm. Slap of bare feet on the linoleum floor, running—end of the corridor and he’s shoving through the emergency exit and—

Into the stairwell—concrete, boxy, wild play of light and shadow as the emergency lights blink orange on-and-off overhead. The assassin is—he hits the rail and peers over—she’s four flights down, taking the stairs two at a time, swinging from the railing, squeal of the soles of her sneakers biting on the concrete surface. Another couple flights and—ground floor, exit to the street.

Gotta catch her. Gotta find out who sent her.

Steve takes a breath, takes a step back.

Brings his hand up to his chest, to the line of dermal piercings that runs down the length of his sternum. Third one down and—presses his fingertips there and pulls, pulls the spell out and through, and he’s running, jumping, spare hand down to snatch the railing and vault up, over—

He got his dermals a little over a year ago. Spent several weeks researching, experimenting, testing theories, because he needs metal, metal to anchor spells, metal that won’t get confiscated on the way through SHIELD security, that he won’t lose from a pocket or sheath in a fight.

Piercings were just about the only thing that’d fit the bill.

So research, so experimentation—he poked a safety pin through his earlobe, through the soft skin on the back of his hand, shifted shape and watched his flesh spit the damn things out. The trick, he figures out: gotta get it done in his real body, give it a good long window of time to heal before he shifts.

So he was in his real body, a light seeming across his eyes and teeth so he looked mostly human, when he walked into the shop. Lay down on a padded table while a pretty brunette with a naked dame tattooed up her calf fussed over his scrawny chest, measuring and poking and—and an hour later he had a razor-straight row of seven dermal anchors marching up his sternum.

Break glass in case of emergency.

The third piercing down is his parachute spell.

He’s jumping, he’s over the stairwell railing and falling and—and the spell spills out and through him, _go away go away go away_ , and—

Falling, stairs concrete flashing past and then—it’s like he hits the skin on top of a pot of porridge—falling, sinking, but slower, easier and—lands staggering, bottom of the stairwell, sharp shock of impact up his legs, knees, into his hips and—

The assassin hits the landing half a heartbeat behind him, and she’s—pulls up hard when she sees him, and an inhuman noise falls out of her mouth: somewhere between a grunt and a yelp, turning so sharp she almost falls, hand out to catch the wall and she’s shoving through the exit door. Steve’s—hand to the concrete floor to catch himself, almost falling—lunges but his hand closes on air—and up, clawing for traction and throwing himself shoulder-first into the door as it swings closed, _bang_ of metal and wood and he’s through, he’s out.

Spills out into—it’s a loading dock, boxy concrete cavern, unlit and still at this hour of the morning. The assassin is running hard for—there’s an armoured van at the far end, idling with its rear doors open under the half-raised roller door. Black, no insignia, no number plates, and no one—he can’t see anyone in the van, waiting outside the van, anywhere.

There’s a body—green and grey of the security uniform—body stretched out on the floor halfway across the open space, sprawled limp, bloody red holes in his centre mass— _fuck_ , Jesus _Christ_.

Steve’s running, pulling up fire from the well in his belly, weaving an ugly hex in the back of his head—gotta stop the van, destroy the engine, stop her getting away—

Song of—it’s a static-scream, razor edged electric _howl_ across the synapses, surging up and Steve—slows, half a heartbeat, because—where is that coming from, is that—it can’t be a human song, can’t be—

Behind—God, it’s coming from behind him. Steve turns and—

There’s a couple forklifts parked against the rear wall, and there’s a black shape sliding out from between them, out of the shadows. It’s—it’s the gunman, the shooter from back at Steve’s apartment. Black leather and Kevlar and the muzzle across his jaw and that fucking metal arm, striding into the open and his _song_ is—Steve’s flinching, recoiling, instinctive. The song is—it’s like someone’s stuck a couple forks in his brain and is fucking _digging_ with ‘em and—

The gunman’s metal arm comes up, gun in his fist and—

Blunt clap of—gunfire with a silencer, and—and Steve can feel his seeming starting to fray, to unravel, up above—

_Oh Jesus_ Christ.

He’s been shot in the head. In the illusion head, like a good foot above his actual head, and—

He’s reweaving the spell, holding it together—what—just, what the fuck now? Does he—does he play this out? He’s been shot in the head at close range, and there’s maybe cameras in here, he’s gotta—he’s gotta play this out.

He adds a splatter of iron red to his illusion, ugly bloody hole in the brow, and lets himself fall, limp, muscle and bone in a heap on the concrete.

Okay. Okay, well—fuck.

Okay, so—first he’s gotta—grabs his seeming spell and anchors it to the concrete, to the ground. He’s landed on top of his right hand, pinned under his deadweight and hidden, so—he weaves the conjuring gestures with his right hand, flicking through ‘em quick and dirty, knuckles grinding on the concrete and he’s pulling the power up, shaping, sending it out—veils himself, his real body, and then he’s rolling clear, leaving the Cap seeming sprawled on the ground.

Rolls a few feet away and comes up, hands and knees and into a low crouch, staring, gasping for breath and—Holy Mary, Mother of God. That was too close: if the gunman had been aiming for his centre mass, he’d have shot Steve in the neck. Christ on a cracker—he’s shaking, shaking, and—

The gunman steps in, stands over Steve’s body—over the illusion, and he’s—shit. Steve’s done too good a job with the seeming: staring blank slate eyes and still as stone and the traces of white and pink, bone and brain, inside the tunnelling bullet hole.

And the gunman is staring down at him, head cocked to the side like—like he wasn’t expecting that. Like he’s waiting for the punchline.

His song is—it’s eased back some now, slurring and slowing. It’s that Godawful grinding scream, something that’s not electricity and it’s not metal scraping on bone but it’s kinda like both of them. Reminds him of the Hulk’s song, mindless howl of alarm klaxons and—but there is a pattern here, a rise and fall and rise again.

Punctuating rhythm of gunshots, sniper fire, high caliber, echoing like it’s being fired in a ravine, and there’s—it’s _familiar_.

It’s familiar, how can it possibly be—how is this asshole even _walking around_ when his soul is like—why the _fuck_ does it feel like he’s heard this song before, like—

Rise and fall, beat. Rise and fall, beat. You could tap your toe to it. You could set your watch by it.

Rise and fall, beat.

Irish ballad, by way of a medieval torture chamber. And—and that wailing under thread, that—that mechanical howl: Steve’s heard that before.

Hanging off the side of a train car, on a bridge over a ravine in fucking Austria. In February of 1945. Wheels on an ice-slick track, howling, _howling_ —

“ _Bucky_?”

It spills outta him, rasping, hot and urgent as blood from an artery, and—and the veil spell is his only saving grace: no one hears. He’s—he’s frozen, staring, trying to—to see it, to—

It’s Bucky. Somehow, it’s… The lines of his body have changed, muscle and bulk where he used to be leaner, hair is longer, the—the Goddamn metal arm but—but it’s _him._

Steve can see—his features are hidden, nose and mouth and jaw under that fucking muzzle, but Steve can see his eyes, the wolf grey of his irises and pinpoint pupils, the whites stark against the black grease smeared across his eyes and brow.

He’s still. Mother of God, he’s so still, it’s like he’s not even breathing, and—

How? How could he possibly—be _alive_ , alive and _here_ , it’s been—it’s been sixty-nine years since the train, since—and he’s still _young_ , still—he’s _alive_ , Jesus Christ, he’s alive and here and—

And he’s just looked Steve in the face and shot him, close range, shot him in the head like he was putting down a dog, like—

Bucky shifts, brings the gun up and puts another couple slugs in Steve’s seeming—harsh slap of gunfire—heart and abdomen, clean, efficient, fucking _final_ , and Steve’s flinching even as he conjures, threads more power into the illusion to keep it from dissolving, adds blossoming flowers of red where the bullet holes oughta be.

Jesus fuck, this can’t be—how in the Christ is he _alive_? And _here_ , and—

“Asset,” comes from—Steve rips his gaze away from Buck, finds—the not-nurse is in the back of the van, and there’s a guy with her, some mook in tactical gear, submachine gun slung loose at his side, features hidden behind the faceplate of his helmet, leaning outta the van to call: “Asset, fall in.”

Bucky is—he’s still as a corpse, staring down at Steve’s seeming, head cocked to the side again like he’s calculating, calibrating. Shifts and—and _breathes_ , huge and deep, shoulder going back, his whole chest shuddering with it, and his eyes are still fixed on Steve’s face, on the illusion, when he speaks, dull through the mask, rasping like it’s come out past sandpaper and saw blades:

“ _Kto byl on_?”

_Who was he_ —in—in Russian? That was Russian. What the Hell? How could—oh, _God_ —

“ _Soldat_ ,” the asshole in the van barks. “Comply.”

Bucky twitches like he’s been stabbed, uncoils like his whole body is waking up. Slips his gun into a holster on his thigh and strides for the van—it’s a steamrolling kinda walk, solid and predatory as a stalking cat, like—and then he’s climbing into the back of the van and—

_Fuck_ —Steve’s scrabbling, clawing to get up, he’s gotta—do something, gotta—it’s _Bucky_ , he’s—and his knees keep folding, don’t wanna hold him, like all the muscle fibre in his thighs has gone to overcooked spaghetti. He should—he needs to—

—it’s _Bucky_ , how can it be Bucky, how—

Howl of tyres biting concrete and the van is pulling out and Steve’s up, shaking and—can’t let them _go_ , he needs—manages a couple staggering steps and then he’s down again, and everything is smudging to grey around the edges of the world, breath coming thin and ragged like he’s sipping it through a straw.

It’s like his asthma, only he hasn’t had asthma since he ate the Apple, not really. It’s like when he’s used too much magic and his body’s trying to close up shop around him, and he’s clutching at his chest, heaving for breath, heart fluttering so hard and fast it’s like there’s a seagull trapped in the cage of his ribs, panicking and fighting to get out, wings flapping and claws tearing and—

Panic attack. He’s done his homework, done some reading up about PTSD in the weird hours of the night when the nightmares pull him outta sleep, biting at the inside of his arm to keep from screaming. He knows about panic attacks.

And—and it’s easing: he sucks in a breath, all the way in, heaving—coughs it out again with a sob.

Jesus Christ on a crutch. Get it together, Rogers.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Brings his shaking hands up and palms away the tears from his eyelashes, the spit from his lips. Breathe, asshole, come on.

Looks up: the van is gone, long gone—and the assassin, the not-nurse, and the wet works crew that’s been trying to put Miranda Cobalt in the dirt. And answers. And Bucky.

He’s alone, on his knees, in the echoing concrete vault of the loading bay, with two corpses, sprawled and bloody: the security guy—wrong place, wrong time, the poor son of a bitch. _Fuck_ —and Captain America.

Steve lifts a shaking hand and grabs onto the threads of the Cap seeming, tugs until it unravels, falling into shards of gold and blue like confetti, dissolving, gone. Picks himself up and—nope, that’s a no—legs folding and he’s down again, concrete tearing at the knees of his jeans.

Fine, he’ll just—mumbles his way through a few bars of _Star Spangled Man_ until the spell takes off and he’s shifting, growing, creak of his bones stretching out and—

_Bang_ of metal and wood on concrete, the door back to the stairwell bursting open—it’s Sam, gun at his side and eyes darting, taking in—loading bay, corpse, tyre tracks, and Steve, in his Cap shape and on his knees in the middle of the cavernous space like a supplicant kneeing his way up to the altar.

“Steve?” Sam asks. “What happened?”

*******

What the Hell Goddamn _happened_?

Steve is stood to the side in the loading bay, watching SHIELD techs photograph the murdered security guard, photograph the tyre tracks from the van, photograph the bullet scar divots in the concrete where _Bucky fucking Barnes_ put two rounds through Steve’s seeming and into the ground. He’s got his face fixed, constipated look of concentration like—Tony calls it his _Captain America is disappointed with you_ face—because he can’t trust his face right now, because—

How in the _fuck_ —just, _how_ —

He saw Bucky _die_ —or, he saw Bucky fall a thousand Goddamn feet into a ravine. That’s not—not something you walk away from. Not—

Okay, so Steve could, and Bruce, and Thor, but they’re—none of ‘em are human, not really. Human-shaped. Bucky was—God, he was the best of Steve but he was just a fella. He was human. But he _survived_ , he survived and—

And now he’s—now it’s sixty-nine years later and he’s not aged a Goddamn day and— _Christ_. Mother Mary fulla grace, he’s—

He must be more than human. Must be: it’s the only possibility that makes a lick of sense. But he never _said anything_ , never—unless he didn’t know. Unless he didn’t know, and then—

And then he fell, and he lived. And—and someone found him, welded a metal arm to his fucking skeleton and gave him a job in fucking wet works for seventy Christ forsaken years and he—

And he didn’t recognise Steve. And he doesn’t _remember_ … Steve.

Scrape of rubber soles on concrete and—Steve snaps back to attention—Sam is back, leaning in against the wall to Steve’s left, arms crossed. He’s got a SHIELD contractor pass someone’s given him on a lanyard around his neck, keeps bouncing between crime scenes: here, in the loading bay, with Steve, and upstairs, in the ICU, Cobalt.

“She gonna live?” Steve asks. It’s the first time he’s spoken in like an hour, and his voice comes like he’s been breathing mustard gas.

Sam makes a face, pissed-off moue of his mouth. “She’ll live. Probably needs dialysis—whatever was in that syringe did a number on her kidneys—but she’ll pull through. Assuming no more of this shit goes down,” and he waves a hand at the scene, SHIELD tech on hands and knees measuring the bullet holes in the floor, the team from the coroner’s office starting to bag up the security guard.

Steve nods—tries to get his face to do something, working his jaw, but it’s stuck on _stoic determination_ , and there’s—it’s a tremor in the muscles of his arms, a wet burn in the backs of his eyes—threat like a line of black clouds on the horizon.

He’s holding himself together with—Jesus Christ, like a couple paperclips and a lotta centring breaths right now, and he can’t—can’t be that Goddamn self-indulgent. Can’t fall apart right now.

“You okay?” Sam asks, studying Steve like—like he’s seeing straight through Steve’s performance, Goddammit all to Hell—

“Fine,” Steve says, lies, immediately.

It’s quiet for a minute—Sam is still watching Steve, arms crossed and his neutral counsellor face on, and then—“So what’s our next move?” Sam asks.

_What’s your play, asshole?_

The thing is—the thing is it’s Bucky.

Steve cannot fucking pretend he’s thinking straight right now. Sixty-nine years is still too soon. There is nothing calculated or logical happening in Steve’s brain pan right now—just this long wounded animal wail, broken keening howl because—

It’s Bucky. It’s Steve’s Bucky, and—

And he shot Steve in the head and— _kto byl on, who was he_ , like he didn’t _know_ , like they didn’t eat breakfast staring at each other across the Goddamn dining table for four years, didn’t follow each other to War and fight and fuck around and—

And his song is _broken_ , a nightmare, it’s—like his soul has been carved out, like they crammed the vessel of his body full of rusty razor blades and landmines and every time he moves he’s cutting himself, deeper and deeper.

Steve doesn’t—Christ. _Pater noster, qui es in caelis,_ _sanctificetur nomen tuum—_

Steve cannot fucking begin to imagine how bad you gotta hurt someone to make their song—their soul, their being—sound like that. That he’s even walking around is—it’s like some kinda black miracle.

And then—s _oldat, comply_. Spat out like that piece of shit was barking orders at a _dog_ , like—

Here’s the thing: Steve knows that sometimes you gotta keep secrets. He knows about the calculus of war—about taking one life to save dozens, or hundreds, or thousands. Bucky Barnes was a sniper for a good couple years before Steve ever got to the front, so—so there’s some kinda percentage chance that Bucky kept it up after Steve went into the ice, stayed in the same line of work but found another employer, only—

Only his song is _wrong._ It’s a tray of rusty surgical tools getting dropped down a flight of concrete stairs. It’s the awful heartbeat silence after you pull the trigger and before their head bursts like a ripe watermelon, brains and teeth and—it’s _inhuman_. And the orders, and the missing memories, and the _Russian_ —

The J.B. Barnes that Steve grew up with would never shoot an unarmed civilian woman through a wall. No Goddamn way. Which means—

Means he’s being compelled. Forced to kill—a _geas_ , a compulsion spell, or—or drugs. Mesmerism. Something.

Or they’ve hurt him. Hurt him for a fucking lifetime or two.

So—so Steve’s next move is real obvious, when you put it that way.

It’s New York all over again—Loki, Steve’s Da, bringing down war and death on the world, the Chitauri and—and he was a _puppet_ , compelled by sorcery, a tool in the hands and the will of the Titan Thanos.

Steve got him out. Got him free. Broke the compulsion— _cognitive recalibration_ , hammering the rim of his shield into his father’s skull and—

Bucky is under a compulsion. Steve’s gonna get him free or fucking smash himself to shards of bone and ice-cold rage against a Goddamn brick wall, making the attempt.

And then—and then he’s gonna find the assholes holding Buck’s leash and end them—tear down their castles and salt their fields and—

Cobalt. They wanted Miranda Cobalt dead, wanted whatever she knows to stay hidden. So he’s gotta follow the trail, follow the evidence back and then—and then Bucky.

Steve looks up, meets Sam’s gaze, and—and there’s cold unfurling in his belly, licking up his spine like blue flame, chasing over his ribs and into his lungs, his heart. Stiffening his spine like a line of rebar. Turning the blood in his veins to razor wire.

It’s easy to make his face shift, paste on the familiar look of constipated determination. “I’m gonna go to work,” Steve says.

********

Oh-seven-hundred at the Triskelion, meeting room on the twenty-second floor and—

“Miranda Cobalt,” Agent 13 says—she’d introduced herself to Steve all proper-like when he walked into the meeting room, shaking his hand and making deep eye contact like the past year and some of Kate the nice nurse from Apartment 6 has been folded away into a back pocket. She’s leaning her hip against the edge of a table, laptop open with the screen faced towards the room.

Cobalt’s image is on-screen: holding a bunch of flowers and smiling sheepishly. Facebook photo or something.

“Mrs Cobalt was shot by an unknown assailant in Captain Rogers’ apartment at 0220 this morning,” Agent 13 says, and then looks to Steve, cocks her eyebrows. “Captain Rogers?”

“He was fast, and strong,” Steve says. “Had a metal arm.”

The briefing is himself, Agent 13—and her real name is a fuckin’ state secret even here, at the heart of SHIELD, which is a mystery for another time—and Agent Phil Coulson, who—shifts in his chair, leans forward.

Like Steve’s nine word description means something to him, like that’s piqued his interest—left hand fidgeting with the cuff of his right shirt sleeve, the way the fabric sits over his prosthetic hand. It’s one of his few tells.

He’d picked up the prosthetic after the Battle of New York, the quinjet crash. And the—Steve’s never seen it but he’s been told there’s scarring over his arm and torso, down his hip. Burns. Enough to compromise his mobility, enough to bench him from the field—but not from the fight.

He’s a damn fine analyst, probably the best working for SHIELD, and he's gonna be taking point on this shit storm. And there’s not much in the way of secrets he can’t unearth so—so Steve keeps a respectful kinda distance, because he has too many Goddamn secrets that he can’t risk spilling.

“Cobalt told me she’d come to me because she felt like the police were involved in the attempts on her life, or had been compromised,” Steve says. “She told me they were after her because of her husband—Charlie. Charles.”

“Charles Cobalt,” Agent 13 says, and hits a button on the laptop. The picture changes: he’s a pasty looking guy in his fifties, soft wool jumper and beige colouring and glasses and a wildly cheerful grin, holding some kinda bright coloured plastic rifle—the kinda that shoots foam darts. Another Facebook special.

On the other half of the screen is his picture from the morgue, dead pale and soulless, flat, ugly purple contusions down the side of his face.

“Dr Charles Cobalt worked as a medical examiner through Fairfax Hospital,” Agent 13 says. “He was killed by what looked like a random hit and run thirty-eight hours ago—” Another tap of a button shifts the images on-screen to crime scene photos, tyre tracks and smears of blood across the black tar of a road, Cobalt’s crumpled body in a gutter.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

“Dr Cobalt worked with Dr Janet Sheldrake,” Agent 13 says, relentless, hitting the button again: another photo, this time a black woman in her sixties, neatly fixed tie and hair in a bun, paired with another Goddamn morgue photo. “Sheldrake was found dead in her home forty-five hours ago. Preliminary results of her autopsy are saying the cause of death was a heart attack.” There’s a quirk to her mouth as she says the words, sideways pull to her lips—she’s not buying that theory.

“They’re getting sloppy,” Coulson says. “There’s a clear escalation—from Sheldrake’s death, carefully disguised, to Dr Cobalt’s—it’s messier. Less planning. And now the attempts on Mrs Cobalt’s life. It’s all got away from them—or there’s an element of time. Some clock they’ve gotta beat.”

“What did the doctors find that these guys wanna bury?” Steve asks.

“I asked Fairfax Hospital that question this morning,” Agent 13 says, crisp, brittle. “Someone has been into their system and purged the morgue’s patient files for the last three weeks, but Cobalt was a recent hire and was still using a personal email account—so on a separate server.” She hits another button on the computer and a few lines of text pop up, black against white.

_Swing down to E2 when you can. Second opinion needed. What am I looking at?? Please bring X-ray form & label for pt Hart. ??dental scans TBA?_

Agent 13 reads it off, adds: “From Cobalt to Sheldrake, five days ago.”

“They found something in a dead person’s _mouth_?” Steve asks.

“Who was Hart?” Coulson asks.

“The morgue’s records are toast, but one of the hospital receptionists keeps pen and paper jottings of patients in by ambulance—we went back over the last week and found—” Agent 13 hits another button and another picture pops up: white guy in his seventies, receding hairline, rosy-cheeked and round like someone’s grandfather, benign smile.

“David Hart was a senior investigative analyst who worked for the FBI,” Agent 13 says. “Ambulance records have him found unresponsive at the bottom of a flight of stairs at his apartment building seven days ago. Doctors in the ED that night remember declaring him DOA.”

“The FBI,” Coulson says, sitting back. There’s a gleam in his eyes like it’s Christmas morning, like he’s found the parcel with his name on it under the tree and it’s a real promising weight, the right kinda shape—

“Hart headed up the FBI’s recent investigation of the Presidential election,” Agent 13 says, mild as mother’s milk.

There’s dead silence for a moment, and then—“That’s interesting,” Coulson says, just as mild, cocking his head and fidgeting with his cuff again.

“So what the Hell was in Hart’s mouth?” Steve asks.

“We don’t know,” Agent 13 says. “The records in the hospital’s computer system are gone or corrupted. His body was cremated two days ago—no one seems to know how that happened, neither Sheldrake or Cobalt signed off on the body being removed. No physical evidence left. Maybe Miranda Cobalt knows.”

Another heartbeat of quiet, and then Steve says, “We are three days out from Hammer’s inauguration. Could be the ticking clock these guys are rushing to beat, the increasing violence…”

It’s quiet for another moment—no one wants to say it, no one wants to be the one who—“If we follow the chain,” Agent 13 says. “Sheldrake, Cobalt—the doctor and then the wife. The common element is the morgue at Fairfax, something they found in the last week that someone wants to stay hidden. And the only remarkable thing I found, in any of the emails, leads…” She points at the laptop screen, at David Hart’s smiling face.

To the FBI analyst who signed off on the investigation that’s letting Justin Hammer waltz into the Oval Office in three days. Who signed off the all clear: no vote tampering, no corruption, nothing to see here, folks.

“If we have reason to suspect that David Hart had something to hide—something worth killing three people to keep hidden—then that casts doubt on everything he’s done with the FBI,” Agent 13 says. “Including the investigation following the November election. Which means _this_ investigation should go to the CIA.”

“Tell me about the ballistics,” Coulson says.

Agent 13 blinks, takes a second to change gear, and then—“In the Miranda Cobalt shooting? Single slug, Soviet-made. No rifling, untraceable.”

“We’re keeping the investigation,” Coulson says, fixing his cuff one last time and standing up. “This is definitely in our wheelhouse. With the Director’s permission, I’m going to call in Romanoff—I believe she’s engaged in an op, but this takes precedence.”

“What do you know?” Agent 13 asks.

“Fast, strong, metal arm, Soviet arms and ammunition. Do the math,” Coulson says, hauling a phone out of his pocket.

_Bucky fucking Barnes_ , Steve thinks, and—“The Winter Soldier is a _myth_ ,” Agent 13 says.

“He’s real,” Coulson says. “Agent Romanoff has encountered him personally. And the reports suggest he’s got more-than-human enhancements, which means this investigation is still SHIELD’s baby.”

“Tell me about the Winter Soldier,” Steve says, biting at the inside of his mouth to keep his face from shifting—Bucky, Buck— _Jesus, sweetheart_ —

“The Winter Soldier is an urban legend, in the intelligence community,” Agent 13 says. “He’s an assassin. Rumoured to belong to the Soviets, or—or possibly another player. The stories about his kills go back _decades_ , he’d have to be… seventy years old by now.”

Ninety-six, in point of fact. Ninety-seven in March. Holy Mary, Mother of God—

“He’s real,” Coulson says again, tapping at something on his phone. “And if he’s here, we’re looking at something big. This could just be the tip of the iceberg.” Half second pause, and then his lips quirk and he looks up, adds: “Winter-themed pun unintended.”

*******

After Coulson goes to track down Director Fury, and Agent 13 goes to coordinate Special Services to cover Miranda Cobalt in the ICU at the George Washington University Hospital, Steve goes downstairs, meanders out the front foyer doors, and crosses the ring road to the food trucks parked next to the river.

The coffee van is third in the row, and Steve buys a large—add four extra shots, thanks; yes, really four, because God knows he’s had zero sleep in the last twenty-four hours and the next person who tries to tell him that caffeine can’t possibly work on him, his enhanced metabolism— _it’s just the placebo effect, Rogers_ —is gonna end up wearing a large coffee with four extra shots.

Then he pulls out his SHIELD-issued cell phone and takes a photo of the drink, texts it off to the Black Widow—or to Natasha’s latest burner phone. He doesn’t bother saving her cell numbers anymore; they change every few weeks.

Blank text, image attached of Steve’s coffee, his hand, holding the drink so three fingers are visible—their code, established a year and some ago. Three fingers is _need to talk_.

She won’t text back—if Coulson’s right she’s probably elbow deep in an operation, interrogating someone or—what happens is she’ll just appear, a day or a week later. Buying frozen peas at Steve’s corner store, or sitting in the sandwich shop he hits some days after his morning run, or walking past him in the street, very casual.

It’s something of a power move—proving she can always find him. She’s got her games. Steve’s got his own.

Has a long swig of his coffee—it’s scalding hot, kinda burnt, exactly what he needs—and then exits out of the messaging app, boots up his contacts, and calls Tony Stark.

*******

The phone rings, four, five times, and then Tony’s voice, rasping—“ _This is my personal number. You should absolutely not have this number—_ ”

“Hey, Tony,” Steve says, barrels over him, having a swig of coffee. He’s standing beside the Potomac River now, grass and soft soil under his boots. The Triskelion is off behind him—he’s across the ring road, circling the compound, slow and easy. SHIELD security are gonna know he’s here—there’s nowhere on this curve of the river that they don’t have eyes—but they won’t be able to hear him.

Not when he’s talking to Tony, anyway. He’s got some kinda electronic shielding on the calls to his personal line.

Steve’s followed the SHIELD playbook like a good soldier for two years now—because he needs ‘em. Their trust, their arsenal. But that was—that was before he knew about Bucky, and—

If Steve’s gotta go off script to find Buck, bring him down alive, bring him in safe, then—then shit with SHIELD is gonna get awkward, real quick. They’ve turned a blind eye to the public work he does with BAST—or, so far, anyway. They’re not gonna be so understanding if it looks like his loyalty is—scattered.

Tony’s voice sounds—off. Tired, in pain maybe. There’s the hum of some kinda machine in the background, the whisper of oxygen through tubing—

Oh, Jesus Christ. The surgery.

“How—how’d it go?” Steve asks—God Almighty, in all the mess and chaos and running and shooting and _Bucky_ , he’d forgotten all about it, Tony’s surgery, getting the arc reactor out of his chest at last.

Tony’s been planning this operation for the last three months, recruiting surgeons and researching and designing his own magnetic equipment when the stuff on the market already wasn’t gonna do the job.

“ _Well, I was at the helm, so it went perfectly—come on, Rogers, I don’t wanna talk to your ear,_ ” and Steve rolls his eyes and lifts the phone away from his ear. Still got no Goddamn idea how Tony switches on the camera function on Steve’s phone remotely.

He’s on the screen, washed pale, purple shadows under his eyes and oxygen tubing fed to his nostrils. Dark blue hospital gown, pillow behind his head—Mother Mary, the surgery musta just been—

“ _Two days ago now_ ,” Tony says, a forced kinda cheerful.

Jesus. “How are you feeling?” Steve asks.

“ _Like I had open heart surgery two days ago. But, you know, lighter. Ready to move on from beneath the shadows of my past mistakes, to break free of the cycle of… something… Listen, you wanna see?_ ” The image goes nuts, bouncing all over, flashes of a white roof, bedsheets, some kinda medical machines at the bedside, and then—and then Tony again, hiking up his hospital gown to show—there’s a hole in the centre of his chest, where the arc reactor had been. Some kinda spongey looking silver-grey stuff packed into it, and tubes coming outta there with—creamy-coloured stuff in ‘em.

“That’s disgusting,” Steve says. “I’m happy for you, Tony.”

“ _Isn’t it?_ ” Tony says fondly, hauling his gown back down. “ _Did I tell you we invented a new kinda surgical ceramic compound to replace the midsection of my sternum?_ ”

“You’ve told me a couple times,” Steve says, biting at the inside of his lip to keep from grinning. “Just how high are you right now?”

“ _Cap, I am orbiting Mars,_ ” Tony says, dropping his voice like he’s imparting some kinda hidden wisdom.

The thing is—Steve did not plan on actually liking Tony Stark.

After the Battle of New York—and Steve’s the only asshole on Earth who knows that the battle’s not over, that Loki and the Chitauri were the first pulse of a tide of destruction that’s gonna sweep the world under when Thanos comes.

After the Battle, and after Steve busted his Da out of SHIELD custody and spirited him away—last seen drinking gin on the concrete floor of a storage unit in Hell’s Kitchen, plotting his return to Asgard—after Steve learned about the Titan Thanos and the slow wave of violence and death grinding its way across the galaxy, coming for the Earth with the same kinda inevitability as an avalanche down the mountainside—well, the first thing Steve did was get drunk as a fucking fish.

Second thing was join up with SHIELD. When the war comes, the world needs to be ready, and SHIELD is about the closest thing they’ve got to a military presence with global reach, so he’s gonna lend them his strength, his skill, earn their trust, but—

But his Mam always taught Steve—you don’t put all your eggs in one basket. So, SHIELD, but also: Stark.

If there’s anybody on this rock with the technical know-how to defend an entire planet from an invading army of Goddamn aliens from outer space, it’s gotta be Howard Stark’s kid.

So Steve—and he feels like a _heel_ , he feels like a wolf. The Brooklyn kinda wolf, sniffin’ after tails, not the Greenland kinda wolf—Steve makes a point of getting Tony’s number, makes a point of being _just in the neighbourhood_ , swinging by to see him. Full scale charm offensive, playbook stolen from J.B. Barnes way the Hell back in the 30s, trying to persuade some girl that she oughta like him coming around.

Difference being that Buck wanted kissing on, and Steve wants Tony Stark to invent some kinda fucking space lasers and save the world.

Actually liking the guy wasn’t anywhere in the plan. But then—

But then prickly dark-haired genius lunatics are kinda Steve’s speciality, after a lifetime of Loki, of being Loki’s kid. And Steve knows a couple things about being lonely, and Tony—

“ _When are you next in Manhattan?_ ” Tony’s asking. “ _Take a weekend, I’ll send the jet. Come over and—you’ll have to cover yourself in hospital-grade Lysol, I’m the Boy in the Bubble right now—_ ”

Jesus. “Tony, I’m sorry,” Steve says. “I’ve got ulterior motives, calling you.”

“ _You wound me,_ ” Tony says. “ _Really, there’s this big hole in my chest right here—what’s going on?_ ”

“Justin Hammer,” Steve begins.

“ _That greased-up weasel,_ ” Tony spits.

“You guys have history,” Steve says—he’d started reading, catching up on the back story, when Hammer first started making waves in the pre-election campaigning.

“ _He aspires to being bargain-basement me,_ ” Tony says. “ _Only with the total vacuum absence of any talent, or charm, or—we competed for military contracts for most of a decade._ ”

“And then he testified against you at the hearings about your suit,” Steve says.

“ _Wanted to get his tiny sticky hands on my designs,_ ” Tony says, fidgeting with his oxygen tubing. “ _Because, you know, why design your own stuff when you could steal—and then he got all pally with Senator Stern, and I was kinda keeping half an eye on that hot mess but then a crazy Russian engineer tried to murder me and I dropped the ball. So, what’s the story?_ ”

Steve swigs coffee and walks, traces a circle around the man-made island of the Triskelion, asphalt and grass and concrete underfoot. Rattles off the basics—just enough intel to follow the story, no names or dates, so they've both got some level of plausible deniability if and when this all hits the fan. “So the FBI investigation might not have been on the level,” Steve is saying. “Which means that the election results might not have been on the level. Which means—”

“ _Hammer, you naughty shit,_ ” Tony says, mouth twitching—some cocktail of furious glee.

“Without the FBI fella’s body to give us some kinda evidence trail, all we’ve got is conjecture,” Steve says. “Which means SHIELD isn’t gonna get any kinda warrant to get records offa the FBI or Hammer. But if some anonymous citizen were to, I dunno, say, hack into ‘em and post every word of it on WikiLeaks—”

“ _Captain Rogers, you naughty shit,_ ” Tony repeats, gleeful like a kid sitting on top of a mountain of candy.

Any other mission and—this is gonna fuck SHIELD’s investigation. Fuck it up beyond all recognition, but—but there’s Bucky.

And Hammer’s inauguration is all of three days away, which means in three Goddamn days Justin Hammer is gonna have access to _nuclear launch codes_ and every Goddamn bit of intelligence that flows through the President’s office.

If he’s crooked—

Time is short. Time is so fucking short, and if going through the proper channels means people getting killed—if it means leaving Bucky in the hands of these assholes a single second longer then he’s gotta—then Steve will do it the other way.

“ _Tony?_ ” someone is asking—it’s muted, coming at a distance through the phone speaker, and then—“ _What—why do you even have that?_ ” comes louder, and the image on screen jolts and weaves. It’s Ms Potts—Steve recognises her voice—and then—

“ _Come on, Pep, don’t—_ ” Tony’s saying, and the image on screen veers wildly, sheets and wall and—

“ _This is a hermetically sealed sterile chamber and—who smuggled this in? Do you even know how many strains of staph are on the average cell phone?_ ” Ms Potts is asking, strident as the trumpet call on Judgment Day, and—

“ _Of course I—_ ” Tony’s saying when the call cuts out.

Steve gives it a few minutes, meandering along the river bank, over the bridge, back to the front foyer entrance. Finishing up his coffee. Tony doesn’t call back, which is about what Steve was expecting. He’s met Ms Potts a good half-dozen times, visiting the Tower—Tony is not gonna make any kinda end run around that dame.

But he won’t quit, either. There is not a Goddamn ounce of quit in Tony Stark, which means he’ll find a way to get the job done, get at his toys, sooner or later, and then he’ll find a way into the FBI’s records of their investigation, into HammerTech, and then—

And then they’ve gotta hope to Christ there’s something there. Something that strings together some kinda meaning outta all of this—the killings, the hit squad. Bucky Barnes in a Kevlar muzzle, shooting an unarmed civilian through a brick wall.

It’s gotta lead Steve to Bucky.

Please, God, Almighty God, _please_. _Let me find him. Twice in one lifetime is a lot to ask_ —if there’s a price to pay then let it come outta Steve’s hide but— _please_.

In Jesus’ name, amen.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for horrible traumatic shit happening in Department X / the Red Room, particularly sexual assault / abuse of minors. Nothing happens on screen, but Natasha unpacks some of her baggage. Proceed fore-warned, loves.

And he’s stalled. Steve is outta moves. He’s rolled the dice, made his two plays—Tony Stark, working the FBI, working Justin Hammer, looking for actionable intel behind the public faces and the firewalls, and Natasha Romanoff, resident expert on the Winter Soldier—also known as JB fuckin’ Barnes, late of Brooklyn and the Howling Commandos.

And now he’s gotta wait.

Wait for either of ‘em to come back at him, give him something he can work with.

Wait for Coulson, working the SHIELD investigation, to pull on a thread of intel and unravel something whole from this mess.

Wait for Miranda Cobalt to wake up, tell ‘em what she knows, what’s in her head that is so damn important they’ve tried to kill her three times in the last twenty-four hours.

Jesus, he’ll settle for another Goddamn hit squad dropping outta the sky to try and murder him. At least he’d be moving, doing something. At least it wouldn’t be just holding his ground and waiting and knowing that Bucky’s out there and the fucking clock on Inauguration Day is ticking down and—

Steve goes to the gym on the fifth floor of the Triskelion, hangs up one of his heavy-duty reinforced punching bags. Grabs his set of rubber training knives outta his locker. Spends a good hour killing the bag, all of his strength and speed, all of his nastiest tricks—the ones he picked up from Loki, the ones he picked up from Natasha—until the bag splits open, carbon-fibre fabric coils unfurling like loops of gut from a wounded soldier.

When he drops his combat stance, rubs at the sweat on his forehead with the wrist of his hand wrap, and turns around, he remembers why he doesn’t Goddamn do this during the daylight hours: there’s a good dozen rubberneckers standing around, propping up the walls so they can watch like he’s performing for their entertainment.

It’s—he recognises ‘em all, agents and support staff he’s seen around once or twice or a half-dozen times, his eidetic memory capturing faces and voices and scents like a rat-trap. But he can only put a name to the face for one of ‘em—Brock Rumlow, STRIKE Team Alpha.

Rumlow is standing next to the gym door, backpack still looped over his fingers like he’s forgotten he was holding it. He’s frozen in place and—staring, like he’s fascinated, and—

There’s something almost—almost confused. Almost fearful, on his face, in the set of his jaw, the whites of his eyes. Which—Steve gets that, sometimes; he moves faster’n human and fights dirtier than a junkyard rat, but then—but Rumlow’s seen Steve in action before. He sees Steve in action every second mission—Steve works with STRIKE Alpha more’n any of the other teams. So—

“Rumlow,” Steve says, slowing to give him a nod on the way past, and:

“Cap,” he answers, sounding winded. He’s looking Steve over now like he’s inspecting a truck in a used car lot. Not quite managing eye contact. “Looking fighting fit out there.”

“Thanks,” Steve says, like the awkwardest motherfucker alive, and then—

He showers off and goes to hassle Coulson. Which is—it’s him being a fuckin’ mess, needing to keep moving, but it’s also tactical. Coulson is a pit bull, and there’s every chance his investigation will turn something up before Steve’s off-the-books approach yields any fruit and—and there’s also every chance that Coulson closes Steve outta the loop. Because Steve’s not an investigator, and he’s not a spy; he’s SHIELD’s glorified thug. A triggerman, and—

—and Coulson chases him outta his office again inside of three minutes flat. Doesn’t so much as put his phone down once in that time—he’s got his teeth in, print-off copies of emails over his desk and security footage stills pinned up to the walls and—

There’s nothing new. “Not in four hours. You need to give me a little longer than four hours, Captain.”

And then—

And then Steve takes his bike over to the hospital.

Cobalt is still in the ICU, still out cold and intubated.

“She’s stable,” Sam is saying. They’re outside the room, keeping watch through the window, letting Cobalt’s sister have the room—she’s sat at the bedside, doubled-over with Miranda’s hand clasped between hers, milk-white with grief.

“Looks like they won’t need to operate on that lung,” Sam says. “Docs put a camera down this morning, and the lung tissue is closing over on the inside.”

“Gotta take our wins where we can get ‘em,” Steve says, distracted, studying Cobalt, the machines and drips and drains keeping her alive, the SHIELD agents dotted around the ICU.

Whatever she knows, it’s so Goddamn important that some subterranean conspiracy of assholes have pulled the Winter Soldier—nightmare urban legend, super soldier, _Bucky_ —out of myth and dropped him in the middle of Washington D.C. And until she wakes up to tell ‘em—

Back to his apartment.

Everything still stinks like Cobalt’s blood, cleaning chemicals and drywall dust. He shifts over to his real body—feels like he’s stripping outta confining clothes after a long day, like maybe he’s taking off a bra and letting his hair down—and makes coffee and sits in the sun on the bedroom floor like a cat.

Drinks his coffee and fires off an email to Trip, checking in about Inauguration Day—because Jesus Christ it’s only three days away, and time is so Goddamn short, and the email ain’t especially coherent but Hammer and BAST and the movement ain’t gonna wait around until he’s not having a fuckin’ crisis.

Steve gets his ass to every BAST action that he can. If he’s not outta the country, not neck-deep in arms dealers or human traffickers or those shitty AIM-brand super soldier knock-offs that have been showing up in the last couple months. Because his face draws in the news crews and cameras, draws attention to the cause, and because the cops don’t use tear gas so much when Steve’s there, staring at ‘em—

—and there’s still footage circling of that one time the riot squad in St Louis tried. Footage of Steve, Cap-shaped and hunched over and furious, holding the curve of his shield pinned down over the gas canister to contain the fuckin’ fumes and screaming at the ranks of cops—“The use of aerosolising weapons is banned under the _Geneva Goddamn Protocol_ , the Hell is _wrong_ with you?” and—

The comments always joke about how much Brooklyn is comin’ through in his voice, shouting, but—but Steve mostly hears the note of Irish. Hears how much he’d sounded like his Mam.

He can’t be everywhere, can’t stop the violence cold. There are always counter-protesters and malcontent shitheads who just wanna break windows and cops that don’t give a single fuck but—but a whole lotta those guys grew up watching the Captain America cartoon and—

If Steve can help, he’s gonna help. And as long as BAST can put him to use, he’ll keep showing up.

And then—and he leaves his mail app and checks his messaging app, leaves the messaging app and checks his calls list, goes to go back to his email and— _stop_. Jesus wept—he’s gotta—all he can do is wait. Wait for something to shake loose.

And the waiting—waiting gives him time to think. Waiting gives him time to—to drop down the ink-black rabbit hole of—of not knowing, of fuckin’ braindead terror because they’ve got Bucky, whoever the Christ these people are. They’ve got Bucky and they’ve carved him out of himself and he’s out there somewhere, close enough to smell his sweat and distant as the moon.

Hurry up and wait, Rogers.

Drops his cell phone and folds his hands into the conjuring gestures and starts to weave sorcery: all of his spell anchors, his dog tags and dermal piercings and his shield, layering the spells in over and over. If the shit hits the fan—Christ, who is he kidding. _When_ the shit hits the fan, he’s gonna be ready.

And then at some point as he’s turning his dog tags over his his hands, working the shape change spell into the metal over and over like the neurotic daughter-son of a bitch that he is, at some point it’s—he’s rolling the links between his fingers, working his way along the length of the chain, Latin phrases turning over in the back of his head like strands of kelp rolling with the pulse of the tide.

Steve doesn’t pray a whole lot, not anymore. He did a lifetime’s worth of prayer while he was in the ice, for all that was fuckin’ worth, and—

It’s not like he’s lost faith.

Hell—he’s a sorcerer. The Lord said _let there be light_ , spoke the universe into being, and the echoing vibrations of those Words are still humming through the threads of the world as it weaves itself into being, today, and Steve _hears_ that resonance as he buys boxed cereal at the bodega down the road, as he sits at Peggy’s bedside and watches her sleep.

He is living proof that the world is capable of terrible miracles.

So he _believes_ , but—

But it feels like he and God don’t have much to say to each other.

Only—fuck. If ever there was a time for prayer—

His dog tags rattle when they hit the wooden floor. He works his hands into fists and opens them a couple times—his Mam’s rosary is in the Goddamn Smithsonian Museum, but he’s got his fingers to keep count of his prayers. Clears his throat and wets his lips and: “Lord—Mother Mary. Let this rosary be for—for the healing and freedom of James Barnes.”

His hands are shaking.

“ _In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti_ ,” he rasps out, and begins.

*******

When Steve gets back from his run the next morning—T minus two days until the inauguration—Natasha Romanoff is there.

He’s letting himself in, key in the door, when—“I got some kinda package for, like, an _S. Rogers_ ,” comes from behind him, Valley girl accent, and Steve turns. Cardboard box, thrust in his direction, and he can just see hands past it, legs in a pair of skinny jeans and sneakered feet, the top of a cap—

“ _Dobroye utro_ , Natasha,” Steve says, putting a hand on the box and pushing it down to see her eyes, green and gleaming.

His game with Natasha has two halves, two aspects. Her game: she plants herself someplace in his path, like a rock in the bed of a stream, face in the crowd, blending in with the wallpaper. Steve’s game is to find her, pick her out of the crowd, see the shape of her jaw past the disguise she’s wearing or pick out the cadence of her voice in a crowded coffee shop. Find her before she can get close enough to tag him, an elbow jabbed in the ribs or a toe-tap to the back of the knee. It’s hide and seek for spies, for professional killers.

When they get deployed on missions together, they both keep a tally of enemy operatives put down over the course of the op. Loser buys the winner coffee.

And—and then there’s the running joke, the S.R. missions.

She still asks him how he did it. How he pulled off all his under-the-table stealth ops during the War. Still makes her guesses, and sometimes they’re dead serious _,_ and sometimes they’re not so fucking much— _I’ve got it. The serum gave you the power to talk to animals_ , after that time she broke into his apartment and found him rewatching _Snow White_.

Natasha is an assassin, a world-class athlete—and that’s a distraction. She’s an _interrogator_ , a spy, down to the basement level of her soul.

Steve likes her, he really Goddamn likes her—and of course he does. She’s calibrating the facets of her persona to mesh with his, to build trust—she does it with everyone, instinctive as breathing.

It’s a Goddamn good thing she’s one of the good guys.

Natasha makes a face at him over the top of the cardboard box, sideways pull of her lips. “Not even ten seconds. What was my tell?”

“You’ve been in a SHIELD facility—maybe in the last six hours?” Steve asks, and when she blinks to confirm it: “I can smell the institutional kinda soap they use in all the dispensers.”

“Are we sure you’re not actually a Golden Retriever?” Natasha asks, and thrusts the box at him again. Steve takes it—light, too light for how huge it is, smell of pastries and baked fruit—and shoulders his front door open.

Inside—ugly dresser-shaped gouge in the hallway drywall from the night of the shooting, half-patched with shaking hands at three o’clock that morning. Down the hall into the kitchen, where Steve dumps the box in a corner, grabs the bag of pastries from inside.

Natasha has padded in after him, near-silent on her sneakered feet, vaulted fluidly up to plant her butt on Steve’s bench top and sit, her usual spot, legs swinging slow and easy.

Steve offers her the bag of pastries, and she pulls out something with cherry, slick of red bright as blood. Takes a bite, neat as a cat and mostly teeth so the pastry flakes won’t stick to her lip gloss. She waits, silent, patient, until Steve grabs a pastry too, switches on the coffee press, plants his rear against the counter and meets her gaze. Waits. And then—

“The Winter Soldier,” Natasha says.

“Coulson said you’ve run into him before,” Steve says, deploys every Goddamn trick he’s got to keep his face calm, his voice even, inflectionless. Like it doesn’t matter, like they’re just shooting the shit, two professionals—

“Iran, 2009,” Natasha says, just as smooth as Steve, neutral. “It’s all in the operation file.”

Steve stashes that intel in the back of his head. Agent Steve Rogers might not have the right clearance to read the file, but he can borrow someone’s face, steal a pass, something to get access—“Humour me,” Steve says. “I don’t want mission specs, I want your opinion. Clearly you don’t think the guy’s a myth.”

“He’s real,” Natasha says, cool and level as pack ice, and has another bite of danish.

Steve cocks an eyebrow at her, waits—mirrors her predatory patience back to her, unblinking—he’ll swear before Christ she’s part cat.

She chews, studies him, crooks a half-smile and then says, “I was assigned to pull a defecting nuclear engineer out of Iran. My contacts on the ground—there were rumours. That the Soldier had been seen in Tehran, that he was coming. I didn’t bank on them.”

She shifts, puts her half-eaten pastry down on the bench and brushes crumbs from her hands, saying, “And the mission was a cake walk. Candy from a baby, no one got near us. Turns out it was too easy. You don’t see the Soldier unless he wants you to.”

Eye contact again, clear and level. Kinda face she makes when she’s telling the truth, the whole truth, unadorned. It’s also the face she makes when she’s lying, spinning a story outta spider silk and moonbeams.

“We made it as far as Odessa. Somebody shot out my tires, and we lost control, went straight over a cliff. I pulled us out, but the Soldier was there. I was covering my engineer, so he shot him straight through me.” She shifts, hikes up her shirt on the left side, just enough to display a slice of bare skin, dimpled scarring low on her belly. “Soviet slug, no rifling. Bye bye, bikinis.”

“You know those high-waisted numbers are coming back in style again,” Steve says, distracted, turning the story over in his head, and: “Did you see him?”

Natasha shakes her head, letting the fabric drop again and picking the danish back up. “Just got to appreciate his workmanship. He must have shot us from over a mile out.”

Huh. That’s—that doesn’t gel. There’s more, there’s gotta be more. And he needs her intel, needs to know what the Hell kinda clusterfuck he’s wading into—because Bucky’s already eyeball deep in it.

The coffee press clicks, ready. Steve ignores it—Natasha ignores it, ignores him, examining her pastry like she’s strategising her angle of assault over rough terrain.

“I think you know a Helluva lot more than that,” Steve says. “Coulson wouldn’t have pulled you out of whatever op you were working, if your personal knowledge of the guy boils down to one bullet scar and some talk.”

Natasha quirks her mouth. “That’s some nice conjecture,” she says, and takes a bite of cherry glazed crust.

Cards on the table. Natasha is a spy, an interrogator, an assassin: lies are her meat and potatoes, so—so do it the other way. “Here’s what I want,” Steve says. “I want everything you know about the Winter Soldier—rumours, whispers, verified, unverified. And I’ll show you mine: everything I’ve got about the Soldier. I’ll be your confidential source, and you’re mine.”

Natasha is watching him speak, head lightly cocked, studying. Steve takes a breath, pulls his awareness into the middle of his chest and centres his shit, starts again: “And I want time. Time and space to run, to work this thing—there’s a play I can make, that only I can make. I can bring down the Soldier, bring him in alive, along with everything he knows—but not if I’m tripping over SHIELD’s leash around my neck.”

Natasha is blinking, slow as a sun-warmed cat, waiting him out, letting him give her the rope she can use to hang him. Hope to Christ he’s laid down bait sweet enough that she’ll want to play instead.

Steve takes a deep breath, goes all in: “So the deal is: what I tell you has to stay between us, just for now. Let me work. I can take him down, and then—we read SHIELD in after the job’s done.”

It’s quiet for a minute, Natasha—her eyes have gone to the middle distance. She’s running the equations in her head, or arranging the pieces of the puzzle, or however the fuck her head works. And then: “Why would SHIELD try to stop you?” Natasha asks.

“Because my objectivity is pretty damn compromised,” Steve says. “Which is why I wanna know what you know. Fill in the gaps some.”

“What could you possibly know about the Soldier that’s worth me withholding mission critical intel from SHIELD? For any length of time?”

“Cards on the table,” Steve answers, blandly.

“Rogers,” Natasha starts, and—

“I know who the Winter Soldier is,” Steve says. “His name, birth certificate legal and everything. His nationality, when and where he was trained. Hell, I can tell you his blood type.”

Natasha is frozen, staring, still as a two-day-old corpse. She’s fixed, utterly controlled, but Steve can hear the way the rhythm of her heart just fluttered and then sped up like she’s a sports car and the driver’s just nudged their foot down a notch on the accelerator.

She shifts, puts the pastry down on the bench next to her hip, sucks pastry crumbs from her fingertips—delaying tactics, processing. Then: “No one on this side of the Iron Curtain has ever gotten close enough to confirm that he’s even real, let alone—that he might be one guy, one operative with a name and a face and—where did you get your intelligence?”

“Cards on the table,” Steve says.

“How—did they—is it verifiable?” she asks, and this is—might be a first, the Black Widow tripping over her words, thinking so fast her polished facade can’t keep up.

“It’s cast iron solid,” Steve says. “Cards on the table, Natasha.”

She’s silent for a long moment, staring openly at him, eyes darting—his hands, shoulders, eyes, mouth, searching him for tells, studying like he’s a slide under a microscope. And then she says, “Okay, Rogers. Cards on the table. I’ll tell you what I know, you tell me what you know, we leave SHIELD out of the loop. For now. You’ve got forty-eight hours.”

Steve breathes out—okay. Two days. He can work with that. It’ll be enough. It’ll have to be enough.

“Appreciate it,” Steve says, nodding, giving her his best eye contact, honest and earnest and—

“Your intel,” Natasha says. “Can it be verified? Who was the source?”

“I’m the source,” Steve says. “The Winter Soldier’s name is James Buchanan Barnes.”

*******

Coffee poured, sitting on the couch, bullet hole punched through the wall next to their heads. Steve could stick up a frame around the hole, caption it: _Untitled. James B. Barnes, 2014. Drywall, paint, sniper rifle_.

Natasha settles in, curls her feet up to tuck under her butt, sips her coffee—delaying tactics, again. She’s shifting gears in her head, piecing together the narrative, spinning how she needs to spin it, to—“What I’m telling you is classified so deep, it’s technically above my clearance level,” she says, level and toneless—no personas, no playacting. “I’m not the only Widow.”

The story spills out of her—little girls, taken, trained, sculpted from infancy into weapons. She’s cool and calm and distant as the moon, unaffected.

“My memories of that time are patchy,” she says, absently turning her mug of coffee in her hands. She’s not drinking it now, just warming her hands on it. “The Red Room, Department X—they had access to memory alteration techniques—the means to alter personality on the most fundamental levels. I have memories of being a ballerina, of parents that never existed—all fiction. You need to understand this, because it means my testimony shouldn’t be trusted, not entirely. And because that swamp I crawled out of—the Winter Soldier came from the same place.”

“Department X?” Steve asks, and there’s a rasping kinda note in his voice. He swigs some coffee to smooth it out.

“The Winter Soldier was before my time,” Natasha says. “I was seven when the Soviet Union collapsed, and what was left of Department X was folded back into the KGB. They absorbed the Widow program—those of us still young enough to shape. The older assets, anyone whose loyalty they couldn’t be sure of—they were liquidated.”

“That means what I think it means, right?” Steve says, curl of cold slick horror low in his belly.

Natasha quirks an eyebrow, looks down at her coffee for a heartbeat—a silent _yes_.

“Jesus H. Christ,” Steve mutters, and puts his coffee mug down on the floor. “But not the Soldier.”

“But not the Soldier,” Natasha says. Drops her voice, lower, a half-teaspoon hint of a Russian accent sliding in to flatten the vowels: “We heard rumours of him, when I was a child. They called him the American.”

“But you never—worked with him? Saw him in there?” Steve asks.

Natasha shakes her head, makes another quarter-turn of the mug in her hands. “I was too young. And he was only ever deployed for the most crucial assignments. But I listened—to everyone, every chance I got. Secrets were currency, in the Red Room. And some of the older trainers spoke of the American, of _Zimniy Soldat_. That he was inhumanly fast and strong. That he didn’t age. That he spoke English with an American accent, flawless, like was born there.”

Steve has gotta break eye contact, look down, look away, drawing his breaths out slow and deep through his nose. Jesus Christ, Bucky—Jesus _fuck_. He’s been—he _lived_ , he fell and he _lived_ and Steve left him behind like a lost fucking suitcase—

Deep breath. Slow it down, draw it out.

“Why didn’t they kill him during the purge?” Steve asks, and he’s clamped down so hard his voice comes out dead, empty as the vacuum of space. It’s taking all he’s got to not put a few more Goddamn holes in the drywall.

“I don’t know,” Natasha says. “But I can guess. They killed anyone they couldn’t be sure about, anyone whose obedience to the new program they couldn’t guarantee. Assets like us—our loyalty was wired into us, seared in but—but it wears out, over time. The programming was imperfect. It’s how I got out. But the Soldier—if you’re right, if it’s Barnes, he’s been operational since the Fifties.”

“And still obeying orders. Loyal enough they didn’t _liquidate_ him in ’91 when the rest of Department X went belly up,” Steve says. “Christ Almighty. What the Hell did they do to him?”

“That’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question,” Natasha says, and takes a sip of her coffee.

“Tell me about the programming,” Steve says, shifting, sitting forward. “How did they do it?”

“I don’t know,” Natasha says. Sees Steve opening his mouth again and cuts in—“I don’t, Steve. I don’t remember. We were never allowed to remember. If we saw _how_ we’d been trapped, we’d have been able to get free.” Her eyes go distant again, cold, pupils drawn down to a pinhole.

“I remember… lying on a table. Remember hands on my head—” and her spare hand comes up to her left temple, fingertips resting there. “And then nothing.”

Christ on a bicycle. Steve works his hands in and out of fists, takes a deep breath—that could be _anything_ , could mean anything—a spell, a drug, fucking mesmerism. Doesn’t tell him a Goddamn thing about how to fix this, how to help Bucky.

Fuck—if all else fails, Steve can try hitting him really hard in the head. It worked with Loki.

“How did you break the programming?”

“Time,” Natasha says. “Exposure to the real world. And my handler started having sex with me. That really kicked open a few doors in my head.”

She’s said it as cool and casual as the rest, like she’s reporting on the weather patterns in England, like she’s reading from the phonebook. _Fucking_ Jesus _fuck_ , _ave Maria gratia—_

“How old?”

“Fifteen,” Natasha says, and there is something hollow as a skull about the half-smile that crosses her face.

“Tell me you killed him,” Steve rasps. His voice comes out with a little too much snarl to be all the way human, but Natasha doesn’t flinch. She smiles again, small and cold, a quirk of her lips, and has a sip of coffee, and says nothing.

“Goddamn Christ on a crutch,” Steve mutters, gets up because he can’t—sit, can’t be still, needs to—move, to hit something, to harness this low boil of fury into some fuckin’ time sorcery and go back to murder this guy. Murder a bunch of people. Jesus _fuck_.

He paces the length of the room, returns to stand next to the couch. Picks up his coffee and drinks a big slug of it.

“Congratulations on unlocking my tragic backstory, by the way,” Natasha says. “Masterful use of vulnerability as an interrogation technique.”

_If you share a secret with someone, they will return one of their own_ , Loki explained, sometime eighty or ninety years ago, sitting in a booth in an automat. He was using a chicken drumstick to gesture bullet points as he talked, Steve remembers. _Intimacy, tenderness—employed with care, in the right moment, as though you were displaying a soft underbelly. And then they will be yours. People mistake vulnerability for affection_.

“That’s not what this was,” Steve blurts—wasn’t it? Jesus, Mary and—

“Maybe not in the front of your brain,” Natasha allows, smiling crookedly.

Holy Mary, Mother of fuck. God—quick, turn this Goddamn boat around—“Did they—did the Soldier get folded into the KGB with the rest of you?” Steve asks.

“I don’t know,” Natasha says, business again, shifting in her seat, weight off one hip and onto the other. “I made it my business to know—about the other assets, about the trainers, the handlers. Who had influence, power. I never heard anything about the Soldier—not then, and not when I went back and cleaned house after my programming broke down. I thought he must have been killed in the purge, until he put a bullet through me in a ravine outside Odessa.”

“So who the Hell’s holding his leash now?” Steve asks—asks Natasha, the room, asks the world at large—

Natasha flares her eyebrows up and down, sips coffee again. Meets Steve’s eyes over the rim of her mug. Says, “Are we having fun yet?”

*******

There’s still no Goddamn change, no progress, no movement anywhere.

Steve calls Coulson—still pulling threads around the trail of dead bodies. Having coroners sift through the ashes of David Hart, possibly crooked FBI fella, first body in the trail of bodies. Poring over Charles and Miranda Cobalt’s electronic records, phone records, searching their home down to the foundations.

Nothing so far, which means they’ve still got no idea what was in Hart’s mouth, what the fuck was so important that four people have been killed trying to hide it.

Steve calls Sam—“ _The Hell?_ ” comes the blurry answer through the phone, and Steve cringes, rubs at his mouth, because he’d forgotten—

Sam’s sleeping off his night shift sat at Miranda Cobalt’s bedside. She’s still being guarded ‘round the clock by SHIELD agents, but Sam’s taken on keeping her safe as his personal mission—“For Steph,” he’d said yesterday, and when Steve had stared blankly for a heartbeat too long: “My veteran. Miranda’s sister-in-law. Steph died trying to get her to me. I’m not gonna let her down.”

“Christ, I’m sorry,” Steve tells Sam over the phone. “Go back to sleep, pal, there’s no emergency.”

And then Steve stares at his phone for a long minute, before thumbing into his contacts and calling Tony Stark, half-expecting no answer, but—“ _Good morning, Captain Rogers,_ ” comes over the line. British accent, crisp and—it’s JARVIS, it’s Tony’s AI. Steve’s met it—him—them before, visiting the Tower.

“Uhh,” Steve says, like an asshole, because he still doesn’t know how the Hell to address JARVIS. Like a person? Like—like one of those fucking auto-replying bots on Twitter—but one that’s Goddamn chess-prodigy smart, and is monitoring your Goddamn vital signs everywhere you go in the Tower, which is essentially an extension of his nervous system.

“Hey JARVIS,” he says, because the existential question of intelligence without soul is just gonna have to wait for another day. “Any update on—on that situation Tony and I spoke about yesterday?”

“ _In the name of plausible deniability, I’m sure I’ve not the faintest idea what you are talking about, Captain,_ ” JARVIS says, mildly.

Plausible deniability, huh. “Copy that,” Steve says, and then—

And then there’s not another single fucking thing he can do.

He goes for a run. Gets the putty outta the hall cupboard and blots over the bullet hole in his living room wall. Bug-sweeps his apartment. Grabs a sandwich from the corner store and eats it and then throws it up again half an hour later, because his body is a treacherous fuck that doesn’t know what’s good for it.

He’s gotta wait. His hindbrain wants him out walking the streets, wailing and tearing at his hair like a widow, but—but that ain’t gonna get him anywhere helpful. He needs intel, needs a direction—

Short of Bucky Barnes shooting him through a wall again, he’s dead in the water.

*******

Noon, Sunday—T minus 23 hours until Hammer’s inauguration—

—and twenty-six hours into Natasha’s forty-eight hour window before she tells SHIELD everything about Buck, about the Winter Soldier, and then God have mercy on Steve’s soul—

—and Steve is outside the Silver Bough Rest Home, fishing around in the saddlebag of his bike for his cell phone.

He’s gotta leave the phone behind whenever he goes to see Peggy. She’s the only living being on Earth who knows what he is, what he really is—you can’t count Bucky among that number, since he apparently doesn’t even recognise Steve’s Goddamn face—and—and with the Alzheimer’s, she doesn’t always remember operational security.

Doesn’t remember much, most of the Goddamn time—she can tell you the brand of her favourite lipstick in ’52 but she doesn’t remember the names of any of her nurses. She remembers Steve, their work together in the SSR and with the Commandos, their side jobs, his sorcery—but most days she’s astonished all over again to learn that he survived the ice, that he’s here and—

She has good days and bad days and—and she talks. She’s bed bound, most days, can make it as far as the garden if someone wheels her out there, but the rest of the time she’s looking at the same four walls and talking is all she has. So Steve pulls the battery and chip outta his cell phone, leaves ‘em outside.

He’s got no reason to believe that SHIELD are listening in via his cell phone, but he’s got no reason to believe they ain’t. Paranoia has kept him alive this long.

Today—Peggy was—today was not a good day. Deep breath and—and he grabs onto the bike for a couple seconds and just breathes, in and out—today was not a good day.

His phone is—there, under the folded bundle of throwing knives. Battery and SIM card are tucked inside his wallet, which is—there, in the other saddlebag pocket, and—and poking the pieces back together, careful careful—easier when he’s in his real body. When he’s Cap-shaped, like now, it’s like he’s trying to perform microsurgery with a snow shovel, his big dumb hands and— _there_.

Switches the phone back on. It blinks and flashes and then—

Fourteen missed calls. _Fourteen_ —and eight text messages, and—Jesus, he was only off the grid for an hour, what the Hell—

Notifications flash by— _Tony Stark, Tony Stark_ , again and again—one email notification, _Trip_ , probably a planning update about BAST’s action tomorrow—and then his phone’s chirping again, loud and urgent. _Tony Stark_.

Steve picks up and—“ _Grandpa! I was gonna call Life Alert—did you fall and you couldn’t get up? Listen—_ ” and Steve’s rolling his eyes, going to answer, but Tony’s got the wind behind him, rolls right on: “ _I’m inside HammerTech—their firewalls are about as sad and limp as every other thing Justin Hammer has ever laid hands on—_ ”

Fucking _operational security_. “Tony, did you wanna ask if I was somewhere secure _before_ you started talking about your adventures in industrial espionage?” Steve asks, rubbing at his forehead with his spare hand. Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

“ _Ah,_ ” Tony says, and then: “ _In my defence, this fentanyl is excellent. Anyway—I’m trawling through HammerTech and—_ ”

He lays it out: money moving in and out, huge sums and offshore accounts, layer after layer of dummy corps. No clear original source for the money yet—“ _JARVIS has the scent, he’ll find ‘em._ ” And then—

“ _The FBI—I’m inside their firewalls, but it’s… funky. Looking at the election investigation, reading over, everything is… clean, like too clean. There’s stuff missing._ ”

“Stuff?” Steve asks, shifting his weight—he’s leaning against his bike, settled in for the long haul.

“ _I’m looking at the official summary of findings, the report released to the other alphabet agencies, but—there’s no supporting documents. Like, the actual investigation. My working theory is, they have an offline server._ ”

“What does that mean for us?” Steve asks, toeing at the tarmac under his boot.

“ _Means I can’t see any of the good stuff from the comfort of my nice sterile bubble,_ ” Tony says. “ _Means it’s not accessible from offsite. We’d need to get into the building the server is housed in, and—if we can get a remote access hooked into their system, I can do the rest from here. J.—hey, buddy, you wanna cue the_ Mission Impossible _theme music?_ ”

“Can we do that?” Steve asks. He can hear Tony’s music skip and change in the background.

“ _Do you have a way inside the FBI building there in D.C.?_ ” Tony asks in reply. “ _I assume we’re still doing this off SHIELD’s books, so—the sneaky way. Could you ask Romanoff for a favour?_ ”

Steve could ask Romanoff a favour—Natasha would at least hear him out, but—but then she’s already letting him run dark, off SHIELD’s radar, with his intel about the Winter Soldier, about Bucky. There’s no way Steve can bring her in on this—he’s so far outside the SHIELD playbook right now it’s a Goddamn tragedy. Natasha’s gonna flay him alive if she finds out what he and Tony are doing here.

“We can’t bring in Romanoff,” Steve says, and—shit. They need sneaky, need stealth access, which—which Steve can do. Throw a walking veil on and walk right in through the front fucking door. But—

But Tony doesn’t know. About the S.R. missions, about Steve’s history as a stealth operative. He’s only ever been fed the propaganda feed version of the Captain America story, the version Howard Stark knew, that most of the world knows: _who’s strong and brave, here to save the American way?_

Jesus H. Particular Christ—okay. Shit, okay, okay—deep breath, rubbing at his face, and—“Hey Tony,” Steve says. “How much do you know about Peggy Carter and the S.R. missions?”

*******

At 5pm, a courier arrives at Steve’s apartment with a parcel from a Mr Tony Snark. The remote access doo-dah is boxed inside a bed of polystyrene. There’s a sheaf of papers with a floor plan of the J Edgar Hoover building on Penn Ave, and some insultingly labeled diagrams and large-print instructions, how to find the offline server and hook the remote access up.

And then the waiting, the Goddamn waiting.

If he weren’t already crazy as a sack of cats, he woulda absolutely lose the plot for sure.

He needs to go in when building’s close to empty. Maximise Tony’s chances of getting to the good shit before anyone notices, so—so _hurry up and wait_ , again, and then—

And then it’s 2am, Inauguration Day, and Steve is veiled, dressed in his Ghost greys and blacks, standing on the footpath off 10th Street NW. Staring up at the beige and grey brick of FBI headquarters, here in D.C.. Watching for movement, studying the side entry points, and pulling his Goddamn self together.

Get in, get to the server room—Basement One, in the back of the building, according to the floor plans he’s got to work with—get Tony’s remote access gizmo hooked in. Get out again.

And—and if he were to happen to trip over some kinda intel about one J.B. Barnes while he’s in there—

If he’s even—there’s a fluttering panic in the back of Steve’s head. No further Winter Soldier sightings, not a Goddamn glimpse, not since the loading bay at the hospital. This whole Goddamn investigation is—might be—

Christ, it’s gotta lead him to Bucky. _Got to_ , or—

Get it together, asshole. Both hands on the wheel, come on.

There’s—okay. Doors are all secured, locked down, swipe pass access. He’s been vaguely hoping some security mook might wander outside to smoke, give Steve the chance to dart in through an open door, but looks like they got too much discipline to give him that kinda opportunity. Which is fine, he’s got Plan B in his back pocket, but a guy can hope. And then he’s gotta get downstairs, find the servers—

And—and his earpiece vibrates, pulses noise so soft it’s almost subliminal. Steve jolts like a scalded cat, claps a hand over his ear and checks his veil, instinctive as breathing and—it’s fine, it’s okay. He’s hidden; his veil is solid. No one saw, no one heard, just—what the Hell was that?

He taps the earpiece, taps the comms line open, breathes: “This is Rogers.”

“ _Captain Rogers,_ ” comes the answer, robotically smooth as butter—it’s JARVIS. “ _In light of the unofficial nature of your mission this evening, Mr Stark asked that I assist by monitoring communications to your personal device for the duration._ ” Steve rolls his eyes. Of fucking course Tony did.

“ _I felt you should know: Mr Sam Wilson seems to be attempting to reach you with some urgency. He has made six calls to your personal number, all within the last ten minutes._ ”

Holy Mother, what’s—Sam is with Miranda Cobalt, in the ICU at George Washington. Last Steve heard from him he was settling in with Netflix on his laptop to keep watch through the night and—Christ, what’s happened in the last ten minutes?

“Can you patch him through?” Steve asks, and strides forward—half-jump and he’s climbing smoothly up and over the low concrete wall, prowling across to—side door. Tucked outta sight from the street. Just the one camera pointing at it.

Pulls SHIELD’s lock cracker out of his back pocket and fits it over the swipe reader, smearing some of his veil over the device like strands of spider silk.

“ _Of course, Captain,_ ” JARVIS answers, and—

Muted crackle, whisper of breath in his ear—awkward couple seconds where neither of ‘em know what the fuck’s going on, and then, “Sam?” Steve asks, and—

“ _Hello?_ ” Sam tries at the same time.

“Sam, what’s your sitrep?” Steve asks, tapping buttons on the lock cracker.

Justin Goddamn Hammer is getting sworn in as Commander in Chief of a global superpower in nine hours. Steve has gotta get this job done, gotta keep moving forward, even if—

“ _Miranda Cobalt woke up,_ ” Sam says, and Steve freezes, one finger still on the touchpad, listening with every cell of his being. “ _The docs started weaning her sedatives yesterday, were planning to extubate tomorrow—today. But she’s awake now. So the tube’s out—_ ”

“Is she talking?” Steve asks, and— _shit_. Shit and Goddamn, his priorities are fucked. “Is she okay?” he adds belatedly.

“ _She’s okay,_ ” Sam says, and—and there’s the soft metallic thump of magnets decoupling from inside the security door. Steve grabs the lock cracker and slips it back into his pocket, conjures a quick, sloppy illusion—mist, fog, like a tangled coil of silver Christmas tinsel—and throws it at the security camera overhead.

Opens the door—it’s heavy, steel and bulletproof glass—and slips inside. Pushes the door closed again and flicks a dispelling gesture at the mist illusion—inside, clear.

He’s invisible but he’s still dropping his weight low, moving forward into—shadows here, intersection of walls. Stay low, stay in the shadows—he’s got a couple years hard-earned experience, Ghosting. Veils fall, illusions go to pieces, and he’s got no backup—not out there in the streets, and not in here.

“ _—titrating her pain killers. She was damn sore when she first woke up,_ ” Sam is saying. “ _She doesn’t remember a whole lot of the last week—trauma._ ”

Son of a _bitch_. Steve takes a breath, orients himself. He’s in the most nor’-west corner of the building, more or less, corridors sprawling out around him—white, grey, beige, impersonal and clean. Needs to go—there’s a stairwell to the east of here, a way down into the belly of the beast. Steve takes another breath—sniffing, wolf-brain making its own assessments of the landscape—paint, paper, chemical stink of laser printers. Shoe leather. Points himself east and starts cat-creeping.

“Does she remember Charles being killed?” Steve asks, low-voiced—managing to resist the dumb animal urge to whisper, because Sam will ask why the Hell he’s whispering and Steve is juggling enough fucking flaming chainsaws right now, thanks—

“ _She remembers that,_ ” Sam answers. “ _Kinda jumbled on everything that happened after that._ ”

_Christ_ on a cracker. “Ask her what they found in David Hart’s mouth,” Steve says, cat-creeping—intersection, security mook standing guard, hands folded in front of him, cheap suit, eyes glazed and staring into the middle distance. Steve reinforces his veil and stalks past, close enough to smell the guy’s musky-chemical stink deodorant. Keeps going.

“ _Ask her_ what _now?_ ” Sam asks.

“FBI fella. First body on the floor, seems to have started this whole clusterfuck,” Steve rattles off, stopping to reorient. In his Cap shape he can eidetically recall entire floor plans, down to the load-bearing walls and numbers of toilet stalls. Can feel magnetic north, if he turns slowly in place, like a dull pressure in his forehead. His real body doesn’t have those kinda perks in the package, so he’s gotta slow down and think about what he’s doing, check his directions.

“Miranda’s husband found something weird on the guy’s body, and as near as we can tell everything from there has been trying to hide it.”

“ _In his_ mouth _? Okay,_ ” Sam says, and then the line goes fuzzy—like Sam’s shoved the phone against his chest or in his armpit. Steve can hear a door opening, a couple of voices, muffled. It’s—shit, he’s gotta stay on task, gotta get this done.

Takes another deep breath and moves forward again—another intersection, another security mook, same cheap suit, hair shaved tight and close. Turning left and keep going—

“ _He had a fake tooth._ ” Sam comes back on the line, and Steve freezes, full attention: “ _One of his molars, it was ceramic._ ” Pause, and—and Steve can hear Miranda’s voice, muted, the rise and fall of it but no words, and then Sam again—

“ _He had a suicide pill in one of his back molars. Like something out of a spy movie. It was old, started to leak poison—probably what killed him,_ ” and Steve is distantly aware that his hands are shaking, that his knees are starting to fold, slow and almost graceful, but he can’t—he’s putting everything he’s got into his veil, into holding, holding it together, _you can’t fall apart now you dumb piece of shit_ —

“ _They extracted a sample from the tooth, ran some tests,_ ” Sam is saying, the precise and distant kinda tone you use when you’re repeating someone’s words back without entirely understanding—“ _There was cyanide, some—saxitoxin, like a cocktail,_ ” and Steve is sat on his heels, feeling the wiry institutional carpet under his palms and fingertips kinda fuzzy, like it’s happening to someone else, and—

“Saxitoxin and cyanide,” one of the SSR doctors is saying, seventy-some years ago.

They are looking through the bars of a cell, watching—a couple guards are doing chest compressions but the guy is obviously dead as a doornail, grey around the mouth and eyes, hands distorted into rigid claws, foam of spit around his mouth. “Brain death in under a minute,” the SSR doctor says, his mouth twisted in a grim line, and Steve—

He remembers turning away, crossing himself like he usually doesn’t in public because folks ain’t got a lot of fondness for Catholics. Starts to pray and—and under the praying, in the lizard part of his brain, he’s cussin’ something fierce. They’d needed that asshole’s intel, and some schmuck forgot to check his teeth for the suicide pill.

Saxitoxin and cyanide. Standard issue in Hydra’s deep cover agents—as of seventy years ago, when Hydra was still around, still a threat, only—

Only their last stronghold was in the Austrian Alps, and they took it out—Steve, the Commandos, the 70th Infantry—in ’45.

And then Steve killed Johann Schmidt—killed ‘im by proxy, death by Tesseract—and planted the _Valkyrie_ into pack ice, the last of Hydra’s weapons off the game board for good, end of the threat. End of Hydra.

And then the ice, and Greenland, the wolves, sixty-seven years of going bugfuck crazy, wide awake under the ice—but that was the price of doing business, that was—he’d been the shield, protected the entire Goddamn Eastern seaboard from death in screaming blue fire.

He’d _ended Hydra_. Only…

Saxitoxin and cyanide. A tooth, old and cracked—death, and then more death, unraveling like the sleeve of an old sweater, spilling into the streets, picking up speed like a train on the side of a mountain and—

Hydra. Here, nestled inside the FBI, in D.C., in the fucking White House in a few hours. It’s Hydra.

Which means Hydra have Bucky.

“ _—there? Steve? You still—_ ” Sam is saying on the line, muted like he’s calling from the bottom of a well, and—

Steve snarls, closer to wolf than human, low and thick and caught in his throat like a bone. “Son of a _bitch.”_


	4. Chapter 4

For an eon or two Steve is frozen, sat on his heels on the gritty grey carpet, staring into space and—Hydra. It’s _fucking Hydra_ , smugly tucked inside the D.C. FBI like a palmful of maggots inside a rotting flesh wound. Which means it’s Hydra putting Justin Hammer in the Oval Office, and Hydra—

Hydra, holding Bucky’s leash. Having him kill for ‘em, their wind-up clockwork soldier, and— _hurting him_ , hurting him—

Steve’s gonna—

He can hear Sam, still, distant like he’s calling from across the Grand Canyon. “ _Steve, you hearing me? Rogers?_ ” It’s white noise, it’s static, and Steve—

He’s gonna kill ‘em. He’s gonna—

Music, song—and he’s rolling his head up, looking over to—the security mook standing at the corridor junction, asshole in the shoddy suit and buzzcut. His song is shifting—he’s shifting, looking at his watch. Coming up for his break time or somethin’. His song is lazy guitar chords and water over rocks and a whistling kinda noise, steam escaping under pressure.

Steve is pulling the knife from the sheath strapped to his thigh and standing, stalking over—unseen, undetected. Stands about a quarter inch from the security mook and holds, and Steve’s—chest is heaving, breath coming tight and fast but his hands are steady as a Goddamn rock.

Holds the knife so the point hovers a breath away from the guy’s navel, and—he could open him up, like he’s gutting a rabbit. Could open one of the big arteries in the throat and let him bleed out, or plant the knife in his spleen and throw up a silencing veil in all directions so no one hears the screaming and—

“ _Cap, if you don’t—shit, did they come back? I’m gonna—what’s your location? I’ll tell one of these agents you’re in trouble, hang on—_ ” Sam is saying over the comms, over the phone, and—

“No,” Steve rasps, and he’s talking to Sam and he’s talking to himself.

No, he’s not gonna kill this anonymous security goon. Steve doesn’t know how deep the rot goes inside the FBI. Doesn’t know that this guy is Hydra.

And—and that’s not the point of this exercise. Access the secured server, get Tony inside, bring down Hammer and the corruption inside the FBI—fucking _Hydra_ —and the whole festering Goddamn mess. Expose ‘em to the light of day.

And find Bucky.

And get Bucky _out_ , come Hell or high water.

Murdering random assholes, blowing his cover—no, he’s gotta stay on task. And—at least in the Forties these guys had the decency to wear a uniform, identifying squids emblazoned on their shoulders or breast. Now Steve’s got no way of knowing who’s Hydra and who’s not and—

“No, Sam, I’m okay,” Steve lies, and steps back. Turns the knife in his grip and slides it back into the sheath. “I gotta go, thanks for updating me,” and he’s tapping his comms to end the call even as—can hear Sam starting to answer, saying somethin’ but—

He’ll apologise to Sam later.

This is Hydra. He’s done pitching softballs.

The security mook is still right the Hell there, fidgeting with his watch and looking through Steve’s veiled form to peer up the hall, no Goddamn idea how close he came to bleeding out into the industrial carpet.

“Another time, pal,” Steve tells him, and then he turns and heads for the stairwell.

Lock cracker to get through the door—muted beep of the lock letting go, muffled by Steve’s veil—and then down and down into the bowels of the monster, Sub-Basement One.

Floor is off-milk white linoleum, walls concrete, smooth and grey, jumbled letters and numbers—wayfinding codes—painted on in black. Steve takes another minute to reorient—stairwell was on a north-south axis, so he’s gotta turn left—and then he’s off, prowling down the corridor.

Fluorescent bars lighting overhead. There are no shadows, no streaks of darkness that he can stick to—and normally it’s a given that there’s less security in the below-ground areas, places like this. They don’t expect you to get this far inside. But this is Hydra, and it’s Hydra nine hours out from legally taking control of a global superpower—so chances are they’re on high alert.

Steve cannot afford to fuck this up.

He’s moving slow and steady, listening hard—his meat ears, his other fuckin’ senses. Slow and grinding song of concrete, whisper of his sneakers on the floor, traces of other songs, human songs—distantly, maybe only a couple of ‘em. There’s people down here, but no one nearby, and—

Server room, here— _B1C6_ on the door, like on the floor plans. The door is locked, plain old mechanical key lock. He fishes his picks out of his hoodie pocket and sinks to his knees. Pulls a couple pins out of the fold and conjures up a ghost-light—tiny, smaller than a golf ball—right next to the lock and—

Pin to the lock—the most minute metal on metal click and—and something shifts. Surges, picks up speed. It’s a song, muted, low, coming through the door.

Metal, grinding on bone. Howl of ice-slick steel over ice-slick steel, screaming and screaming and—

Steve reefs his pin outta the lock and heaves himself back from the door, shaking and gasping and—fuck. _Fuck_ , was that—is that—

Shit, okay—recon. He needs to do recon.

*******

When Steve moves into the server room, he’s disembodied. Left his meat suit behind, curled up under a desk, a veil pinned across himself, hidden away and empty as a rotting tree hollowed away from the inside. So he’s floating free, through doors and walls and into the server room—

It’s cavernous, grey and white, slate-grey linoleum underfoot. Banks of blinking electronic boxes stand in rows, taller than head high, like monoliths.

The Winter Soldier is there.

Bucky is—he’s standing in the centre of the space, wolf-grey eyes trained on the door—only door in or out. Wide stance, solid, like he’s prepared to out-wait Armageddon. He’s wearing that fucking muzzle again, the black tac suit again, and he’s armed like he’s gonna take down a small nation—maybe one of the Balkans—three guns that Steve can see, a half-dozen knives—

And the arm, the Goddamn metal arm. And—

And he’s shifting, cocking his head to the side—slow, thoughtful, shifting his weight like he’s—like he’s aware that something’s changed, and he doesn’t know what. Like he’s listening hard, scenting the air—

He’s feeling the weight of Steve’s fucking soul. Feeling that shift—that impossibly fucking tiny shift—in the air of the room.

He’s enhanced—like Steve, when he’s Cap-shaped. Like the Red Skull was—more’n human sensory array. Which means—

Means Steve can’t just rely on veils to get past him. He’s gotta be more cunning than that.

Okay, so—Steve arrows around the space, scouting, looking for—cameras, four of ‘em, angled to capture every square inch of the room. There’s the servers, and—and at the back there’s a bank with a computer, one more server, seperate: no cables or cords connecting ‘em to any of the rest of the purring electronic boxes. He dips in close, studies—Tony briefed him, what it ought to look like, the kinda cables that carry data in bulk and the kind that are just power or—

It’s this computer. This server. There’s power going in but no other cables in or out: this has gotta be the private server. This is where they’re hiding the dirty laundry.

Hydra. _Fucking Hydra,_ after seventy fucking years—

Darts over to Bucky again—still fixed in place, but he’s looking around, eyes darting, flesh hand resting on the gun holstered at his thigh. He’s sharp as surgical steel, alert.

Closing in and—and it stings, the closer he gets to Buck, howling metal maw of a song like Steve’s leaning his awareness into the blades of a blender— _Christ_ , Christ on a _bike_. He pulls away again. Away and back, through the wall and down the corridor, last office on the end.

He shudders his way back into his body—twitch of muscle fibre, nerves firing jerky and erratic, scattershot. Bones ache where he’s been pressed against the flooring. Heaves himself out from under the desk to sprawl on the floor, shaking. Cracks his knuckles. Stares up at the pockmarked dirty white ceiling panels overhead, turning it over in his head, the server and Bucky and his senses, the room, the layout, the cameras—

Takes a slow breath in and cramps his hands into conjuring gestures and starts weaving the first spell.

*******

Thing is, Steve’s got some prior work experience in making his illusions go when he’s dealing with enhanced individuals.

He met the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, back when he was still living outta that crappy SHIELD apartment in Manhattan.

This was before D.C.—maybe four months after the Chitauri invasion, after the Battle of New York.

It was the middle of the damn night and Steve was—he’d managed maybe forty minutes of sleep before he woke himself up, grinding out a scream through sleep-dense vocal chords.

He’d dreamed of the wolves, of being with his pack. It was a hunt, chasing down the stragglers from a herd of muskoxen—steady churn of rock and moss and ice under the pads of his paws, sky slate grey overhead, and he was running, easy and tireless and—and the oxen were slowing, the old and the sick and the injured and then—

And then they parted and it was Peggy, Peggy as she is now—grey hair in tattered curls and her nightie with the soft lace at the collar, trying to run in bare feet, falling and clawing back up again—and the oxen have left her behind, outrun her—and she was staggering, looking back. Her face was—it was the exact look of horror and confusion that she gets when she’s in the middle of a story and she’s forgotten what she’s saying, lost the thread, and she _knows it_ , knows that something’s wrong, that her body and brain are betraying her in the worst way and she’s trapped—

She tripped, fell. Steve could hear bones break as she sprawled across ice-slick rock, could smell piss and fear and her Chanel perfume against the sleet-cold and moss of the tundra.

And then the wolves were on her and Steve couldn’t—he had to watch and—

So he woke up screaming and then swore and clawed his way outta bed—outta his weird hobo floor-bed—and went Ghosting.

And it was one in the morning, and he was in some dingy fucking alley, facing these two schmucks—Asshole the Elder had a receding hairline, neatly trimmed beard, tattoos up the exposed skin of his forearms. The younger guy had a matched set of tats, plus some snake and flame designs running up his neck.

They’d been shaking down some dame: sky-high heels and the kinda heavy-handed makeup you see on stage performers or ladies of the night. No one was speaking English—not Russian, not quite, but something like it—but Asshole the Elder had his knife tip tucked in under her chin and she was shaking, shaking, silent tears streaking her eye makeup—and then Steve dropped his veil and threw an illusion of shadows writhing around him, up the walls of the alley, coiling and twisting like snakes fucking and—

The dame—Asshole the Elder looked away from her, looked at Steve, his seeming, knife hand wavering—and the dame slapped his hand away and kicked her heels off and ran, ran in her stockinged feet like the Goddamn wind. And then—

The fight was over quick and brutal—they were both armed but Steve had his knives, his veils, and he was blinking in and out of sight, slashing for the tendon in the wrist and gone again, and—and then Asshole the Younger was down, KOed, and Asshole the Elder was—

He’d gone to beat feet the same way the woman ran, and—no, _I think fucking not pal_ , you’re not getting another shot at her—Steve threw a seeming, big ugly wolf blocking the alley, white and grey of his coat streaked with the dark red of blood, yellow teeth bared in a rippling snarl like gravel churning through a motorbike engine and—

It was roughly twice the size of a real Greenland wolf. Steve ain’t never been above some artistic license.

The guy put the brakes on so hard he just about tripped over his own feet, unearthly kinda yelp spilling outta his mouth. Turned and sprinted the other way like every devil in Hell was crawling up his ass. And then he was gone, and it was done.

Steve rolled his shoulders, slipped his knives back into their sheathes. Cracked his knuckles to shift the knots of conjuring pain in his hands. He flicked a hand to disperse the wolf seeming—growling at nothing, coils of slaver spilling from his mouth—and it dissolved, gold and grey smoke shivering into the wind and—

And there was a song. Steve could hear— _there’s still someone in the alley_.

The song was—soaring organ notes, some big hymnal, and the whisper of chalk over a chalkboard, tap of—tap of wood against concrete maybe, small and soft and subtle, and big brassy notes of a bell ringing. Like in a boxing match.

Steve was looking around, looking up— _no fucker ever looks up_ , Bucky whispered into his ear, sixty-eight years ago—and he couldn’t see a Goddamn thing. His monster eyes are better-than-human adapted for the dark but they ain’t worth a damn over any kind of distance. Empty alley, dumpsters, grate of a drain at the end—

The song was coming from up. He closed his eyes, turned slowly until— _there, up there_.

Opened his eyes: the far end of the alley. It was pitch black, no streetlight spilling that far down into the abyss, just the vague gleam of regular metal lines—a fire escape.

“Help you?” Steve called.

There was silence, dead-still for a moment—the song hiccuped, startled, and then—and then movement in the ink black, scuff of booted feet hitting the asphalt. Come down to Earth, slow and near-silent.

Steve waited. Rolled through the conjuring gestures with his right hand. Listened, with his ears and with his—his inner ear, his fucking _sensory array_ , his mind—

Black against the darkness, emerged: he was dressed in solid black from head—some kinda balaclava-type number hiding his eyes, hair—to boots. Gleam of pale skin—mouth, jaw, hands.

“How do you do that?” the guy asked.

“Do what?” Steve answered, cocking his head.

“The wolf,” the guy said. “It wasn’t real. Sounded real, but it’s all—smoke and mirrors.”

“You so sure about that?” Steve asked.

“Whistle one up and I’ll put my head in its jaws,” the guy answered. “Is it some kinda projection, or a hologram?”

And that was interesting—how the Hell was he so cast-iron certain? Was he—could he have magical sensitivity? Couldn’t be a sorcerer, or he’d recognise what Steve was doing, so—so maybe he was just sensitive enough to—

Senses. Enhanced senses. There was something—

“Do you have enhanced senses?” Steve asked.

“That’s a Hell of a thing to ask on the first date,” the guy answered, and there was something—about the way he cocked his head, about the—the muted _tap_ , _tap_ of thread-fine wood against concrete in his song, like—like a cane.

He was blind. He was blind—Jesus, no wonder Steve’s seemings didn’t put the wind up his skirt. They were big and fancy, Technicolor with surround sound, but Steve wasn’t cunning enough to give ‘em scent, or any kind of _felt presence_. And for most people that worked just fine: they’d see snapping jaws and bristling fur, the flat-flare of eyes gleaming against the dark, and their dumb lizard brain took over, started steering. But this guy—

He was inching forward, slow. Young fella, wiry muscle, dusting of stubble over his chin and jaw. There was—the all black getup, the mask over his hair, his eyes—oh shit, _that’s right_. Steve had heard about this guy.

“I thought you were the Devil of _Hell’s Kitchen_?” Steve asked.

“You wanna check a street sign?” the Devil answered, mild and low—

Street sign—oh. Yeah, he’d followed some dude who was low-key stalking a woman home through the streets, was watching ‘em instead of where he was going—“Do we gotta have some kinda vigilante turf war pissing contest now?” Steve asked, and—

There was a frozen half-second before the Devil flashed a grin and Steve huffed and—

They didn’t have a turf war pissing contest. There were more’n enough creeps and crooked operators out on the street on any given night that they don’t gotta pick any extra fights. And they were on the same side—as far as that goes when you’re a vigilante, anyway—

They ran into each other a couple more times over the next month or so—Steve waded into a fight, the Devil throwing down with a half-dozen gang members behind some dingy fuckin’ bar—and he was a Goddamn sight to behold, fighting: fast as a greased weasel, deadly. And then three weeks later he returned the favour—

Thing was, Steve had hexed all the guns before he even dropped his veil—it was a robbery, five fellas breaking into a warehouse. And they were all armed, and Steve is fucking insane but suicide is still a mortal sin, so he hexed the guns and _then_ dropped the veil—but the Devil didn’t know that part. He was—smelling the gun oil, plastic and metal and cordite—was hearing the slide of round and cartridge—

Came in through a skylight in a hail of glass shards like some kinda avenging angel.

It was over, fast and ugly, after that.

After, Steve was zip tying goons to one another, to the steel shelving of the warehouse, and the Devil was holding one of the guns, inspecting the works with gentle fingertips.

“You’ve got the devil’s luck,” he said. “It’s jammed. He would have put a bullet through your head.”

“That wasn’t luck,” Steve said, and bent to scoop up another dropped gun. “That was skill.” Passed it over, a gentle underhand toss—and the Devil caught it, easy as anything. Christ, but his ears were sharp—his senses, his awareness.

He brushed testing fingertips over metal and plastic, and the gun cartridge fell out. Barrel slid away from the grip—the whole thing gently dissolved into pieces in his hands. “What the—” he said, and then, “How did you do that?”

“Sorcery,” Steve answered, perfect honesty for the first time in his Goddamn life, felt—like someone had pumped helium into his brainpan and the whole top of his head was gonna lift off and float away. Felt giddy, felt terrified, felt—

“Sorcery?” the Devil asked. “Like—like black magic?”

“There’s no colour to what I do,” Steve said. “It doesn’t come from _downstairs_ , it comes from…” He touched his heart, his belly, breathed for a second, felt the truth of it. And then: “Jesus, pal, you of all people wanna give me grief about my immortal soul, Mr Devil?”

The Devil laughed, tossing the broken piece of gun in his hand into a rubbish bin across the room—flawlessly, effortlessly. For pity’s sakes, Steve would have struggled to manage that even with the use of his eyes. Then the Devil turned, pointed his masked face in Steve’s direction again, and said, “You know, they’ve started calling you the Grey Ghost.”

A week later they collided again, and this time the Devil led Steve back to a grungy boxing gym. The central ring had a song of sweat and tears and blood, the steady hum of muscle fibres worked hard. Sounded like victory, and defeat—there was the distant hubbub of voices, crowds cheering—

They sparred for the better part of two hours—and God but Steve hadn’t had that much fun since—since before the ice. Sparring with Buck, or with Peggy. With Ulfadhir. The Devil didn’t pull his punches, and he was _fast._ Steve’s usual bag of tricks—his seemings and veils—weren’t gonna work here, so he’d had to adapt. Started throwing seemings of loud noises, unexpected noises: a horse neighing, the boom of fireworks—enough to make the Devil twitch, flinch, buy himself half a second—

After the first hour they were both wet with sweat, bleeding in at least a couple places, and the Devil took his mask off—casual, like it wasn’t a thing. Mopped at his face and neck with the fabric and then tossed it to hang over the ring rope.

He was pretty. Brunet with coppery kinda notes in his hair. Cinnamon dark eyes that reminded Steve of Peggy. Steve’s great big fairy crush on the guy also reminded him of how he’d felt with Peggy.

There was no—no equivalent gesture of trust he could make—he’d already taken his hoodie off before they started. Already lost the seemings across his wolf eyes, his fanged mouth, wrestling and jabbing on the mat. The Devil was blind—Steve baring his own face didn’t mean a damn thing.

He was still a monster—he still looked like a Goddamn freak. But right there and then it didn’t matter, didn’t make a lick of difference. The Devil closed in to bump fists and start sparring again, his sightless eyes fixed someplace over Steve’s shoulder, and he didn’t flinch.

At the end of the second hour they were both down, sprawled on the canvas, breathing hard, bruised and bleeding from a couple more places.

“That, uhh,” the Devil started, stopped. Sucked in a breath and starts again. “That combination with the feint and weave and throat strike was—where were you trained?”

“My Da,” Steve said. “He was—like me. A sorcerer. And then I—the Army. Trained some with the Army,” which was—close enough to the truth. “You?”

“My old man was a boxer,” the Devil said. “And then—uh. A ninja cult.”

“A _ninja cult_?” Steve repeated, lifting his head to look the guy in the face—

“Yeah,” the Devil said, grinning crooked, and then he started laughing and Steve caught the bug and they were both gone, clutching at bruised ribs and bellies and howling with breathless laughter on the sweat-damp canvas.

Later they cleaned up some, put hoods and masks back on, and—“Matt,” the Devil said, putting a hand out to shake at the door.

It took Steve a second, and then: “Steve,” he returned, and they shook hands, meeting proper like normal fellas.

As far as friendships go, they were so far on the down low, it was subterranean. They were both vigilantes. Steve is wanted by fucking Interpol for that time he broke Loki out of SHIELD’s super-pokey.

They met up every few weeks and beat the Hell out of each other in Matt’s dingy gym. Never shared their full names or life stories or—their lives. Anything, outside of city streets at the small hours of the night, violence, blood and fists and concrete.

But it was something—it’s—God help him. Steve’s gotta be standoffish, gotta be, because he’s a huge fuck-off pile of secrets wrapped in a trench coat and pretending to be a person, so he can’t afford to let anyone too far into his life.

So—so even Matt’s fist in the ribs was better than nothing. It was skin on skin, the warmth and pressure of a body pressed to his when they grapple. It was something.

And it was a chance to try some new shit, experiment with his seemings, with the limits of his magic, in ways that he might not have otherwise. He can’t rely on just making ‘em _look_ good, not with Matt. He’s gotta be more cunning than that.

*******

The second time Steve walks into the server room, there’s two of him.

He’s veiled, his best walking veil locked down hard, hand on the door frame to help him navigate because he’s moving with his eyes most of the way closed—he’s got to cut down on the sensory input to his real body as much as he can.

It’s too hard to be in two places at once if he’s getting mixed signals. He’s had plenty of chances to practice his bilocation over the last couple years, but this is—he’s never tried it with _so much_ of himself over in—

In his seeming. Milk-pale baby Steve at age twenty, hair combed back from his forehead and a gloss of soft pink lipstick over his mouth. Sage green dress with the lace collar and white leather kitten heels.

Experimenting with Matt, he’d found the best way to make his seemings feel more _real_ is—well, there’s the audio kinda element of it. Giving ‘em a pulse, respiration, gut noises, the gentle creak of ribs shifting as the lungs expand. All the stuff that folks with normal senses don’t pick up on, but Matt does, or Steve in his Cap shape. Or Bucky. So he can do that, but also—they don’t really got any kinda _felt-sense_ of realness unless they’ve got some soul in there.

So, bilocation. So splitting his awareness in two: half staying in his real body, keeping the spells anchored and solid, and the other half sitting inside his seeming.

His head hurts. His head hurts so Goddamn bad.

So—he stops in the doorframe, veiled, hidden. Through his eyelashes he can see Bucky from about the hips down, facing his way, utterly still, solid stance. Waiting.

Okay, so first things first.

He’s holding the hex steady in the back of his head. Spent some time shaping this baby just right, weaving in the particular gossipy notes of song that he gets from cameras, bugs, any kinda monitoring equipment. Can’t risk a general hex, or he might fuck the servers up.

Pulls the hex forward and through, grinding his teeth to strangle the yowl of pain—it’s like scraping a red hot poker up and through the middle of his brain pan—throws his hand out and lets it go and—

Showers of sparks, a couple loud electronic _bang_ s and—he can see the camera on the rear wall falling from its mount, coils of green smoke rising from its guts.

Cameras down. No monitoring. Next he’s gotta—

Shuffles his way into the room, slow and careful—can’t see where he’s going, hand on the wall to guide the way—and then he stops, breathing deep. Reinforces his walking veil and then—and then he _steps forward_ , his seeming, distantly aware that his real body is sweating, mouth fallen open in a silent groan, but—

Stepping his seeming forward, baby Stevie circa 1938 in his favourite dress, his fairy best. Into the doorway and through, into the server room.

He’s looking through the seeming’s eyes when Bucky—goes rigid, fully at attention, like a five-star General’s just walked into the mess tent, and—and he twitches, hard, like a shudder that runs from his core through each limb, hands curling into fists and then opening, again and again. Eyes flare open, wild, white showing around the grey of his iris. His chest heaves, like he’s just remembered to breathe, and—shakes his head. Once, twice.

“Rough day at work, sweetheart?” Steve’s seeming asks.

Here’s the Godawful cosmic joke: Steve pulled himself outta the Hell of the ice into the 21st century and found out most everyone he’d ever loved was dead, but—but Peggy was alive. Fading slow and painful, like her soul is a radio transmission moving outta range, but alive. And Steve goes to see her at least once or twice a week, unless one of his missions takes him off to the armpit of the world, so—so he’s done his reading. He knows a thing or two about memory loss.

Knows that—if they don’t remember the recent shit, maybe you gotta go back further.

Buck doesn’t remember _Captain America_ , but he might—

Buck’s eyes dart—left, right, like he’s rattling his Goddamn brain to remember, put the pieces together. Another breath, huge—Steve can hear the rasp of the air through the muzzle. His hands are still shaping fists, aimless, nowhere near a weapon.

Distracted. Which means vulnerable, which means—

Steve anchors his seeming to the ground—leaves it standing in the middle of the room, fairy Steve in a loose, open stance, half-smile on his too-young face. Shifts his attention back over to his real body—

Still parked against the wall at the front of the room, veiled, shaking with the kinda concentration this shit is taking. Okay, he’s gotta—

Straightening up and—forward, prowling across the room. In behind a bank of servers, fishing in his jeans pocket for—there, static-cling round discs, smaller than a dime, and—

He rounds the servers—behind Buck now, and—and Bucky’s stepping forward, slow, awkward, like a puppet with some kinda Goddamn amateur working the strings. Moving towards Steve’s seeming—which is still smiling, quizzical, breathing and blinking and invested with soul, about as convincing as Steve can make it without actually cloning himself.

Bucky’s back is exposed. He’s lifting a hand—his right hand, flesh-and-bones hand, like he’s gonna touch, gonna—

Steve turns the discs over in his hand—two of ‘em, ready to go, humming their malicious little electric songs and—and he’s stepping in, smooth and silent, holding his Goddamn breath and—

“ _Doll_?” Bucky asks, muffled through the muzzle, voice rasping like he’s gotta excavate the word out from under half a tonne of rockfall, and—

The noise that punches outta Steve is—it’s a yelp, broken wolfish sound like he’s just caught a cloven hoof in the head, and he’s stumbling, graceless, hands bleeding numb. Thank _fuck_ for the veil, for that soundproofing, only—

Only vocal noise is still _breath_ , air moving—air moving where it _shouldn’t be_ , and the veil can’t muffle that, can’t—

Bucky stiffens, freezes. His hand drops.

_Fuck_ —and Steve’s lunging, throwing himself forward, hand out—and Buck’s starting to turn, faster than anything human, weapon hand falling to the gun at his thigh—

And Steve slaps the two stingers on to the bare skin of Bucky’s forehead.

Bucky goes—he’s rigid as a board, muscle fibres locking up like razor wire, and then spasming, falling, crunch of metal and bone hitting the floor like a sack of potatoes, dead weight. He’s almost silent, grinding keening sound coming thin as a stray cat through his lockjaw clenched teeth.

“Jesus,” Steve says—his veil’s falling, unraveling from the hand down, and he lets it go. Lets the seeming of his little body dissolve, shards of soft gold light dispersing like mist in the sunlight. “Buck, I’m so Goddamn sorry.”

Steve’s been on the business end of one of Natasha’s stingers before—was curious about how they work. Natasha was happy to indulge his curiosity by electrocuting the Christ outta him. It hurt like Hell—just the one of ‘em, on his shoulder. Steve doesn’t wanna think how much two of ‘em right smack-dab on the frontal lobe is hurting Buck right now.

On task, Rogers. Steve grits his teeth—Bucky’s leg twitches hard, wail of his boot sole biting at the linoleum. Turns away, digging into the holster strapped to his left thigh for—there. The magical fucking doo-dah. Stark’s remote access.

Crosses to the offline server, the computer terminal, stares for half a second before—there, that hole there. That’ll do. Slides the access key into the computer and turns back and—

Bucky’s trying to—the sting’s gone out of ‘em. A shop-standard human would be out cold right about now, but Bucky’s not shop-standard: he’s twitching, pushing to try and sit up, rasping gasping breaths spilling out like he’s just surfaced from underwater.

Steve taps his comms unit—“Fire in the hole, fellas,” Steve says, tells JARVIS or Tony or whoever’s listening, and with his other hand he’s digging into his jeans pocket again, striding forward—now, now, before he gets his feet under him—

Drops to his knees next to Buck and—the mask’s off. That Goddamn muzzle’s come off while he was thrashing and—and Steve’s choking on air, choking back a sob. Bucky’s face—it’s a wild animal fear, lips parted over gritted teeth and whites showing around his eyes.

And it’s him—cheekbones, chin, mouth.

It’s Bucky Barnes.

He’s shuddering, muscle groups heaving, trying to—to move, get up, any Goddamn thing—

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Steve says again, like that means a Goddamn thing to him, and then he jams two fingers into the skin of Bucky’s throat, just under his chin. Hooks the collar of his armour down enough to expose neck and then slaps another three stingers on there.

It’s—Jesus fuck, Jesus Christ—he arches back, convulsive, choked-off scream caught in his throat, crack of his skull hitting the floor, heaving. Steve’s throwing himself back, outta the way—Buck’s enhanced, more’n human strong. Metal hand clawing gouges in the linoleum like he’s trying to hold the world together at the seams.

One stinger knocks out a regular fella. Two was enough to make Bucky dopey, so—touch fuckin’ wood this works, does the job—

“ _Holy—wow. Holy wow, Rogers,_ ” right in his Goddamn ear, and Steve’s jolting like a spooked carthorse before—right. Comms earpiece. Stark.

Tony’s saying, “ _I didn’t think you could do it—we’re in. JARVIS is stealing all the silverware as we speak, so—hang tight. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes to copy everything across, okay?_ ”

“Sure,” Steve says, breezy as a spring day, like he’s not crouched on a server room floor watching his amnesiac long-dead best pal slash legendary assassin have a stinger-induced seizure. “I’ll do a Goddamn crossword, catch up on my correspondence.”

“ _Still got some of that 1940s’ sass stockpiled, I see,_ ” Tony says.

*******

Three stingers does the trick—Bucky’s out cold.

Steve grabs him by the straps on his Goddamn bondage gear tac suit and hauls and shoves and heaves—and _fuck_ he’s heavy. Heavier than he oughta be, feels like more’n 300 pounds, and—

Gives up and shifts over to his Cap shape and hauls Bucky’s limp carcass over to the workbench running down the right side of the room, shoves him in under there like a kid hiding the pieces of his Mam’s broken dinner dish under the couch.

Shifts back to his real body—bite and sting and he’s falling, knees folding, too much magic, too soon to shift shapes again. Feels like something’s gone wrong inside his belly, like the line of his spine is molten steel—

Crawls his ass over to the server because he doesn’t have time for this shit. Dabs a _don’t notice me_ veil over Stark’s remote access doo-dah with shaking fingers. Drags himself back over to the far wall, the work bench, Bucky—still out like a light, but Christ only knows for how long.

He’s gotta have some kinda healing factor, enough for him to have survived falling off the train and whatever Dr Frankenstein bullshit the Russians did, welding that Goddamn arm to his spine.

Steve crawls in over Buck— _sorry,_ a stór _, movin’ too fast for a first date_. Hooks his armour down from his neck again, enough to find his carotid pulse—steady and slow—and plant two fingers there like he’s planting a flag in contested ground.

Reaches deep again, deep into his belly—once more unto the breach, man, come on—and finds enough of the fires of making and unmaking to weave a veil, hide the both of ‘em.

He’s been on a countdown from the moment he hexed out those security cameras. It’s only a matter of time before—

The server room door opens, slow, like there’s a slumbering bear within and—and then a gun, and a hand, and a head poking around the door like some kinda fuckin’ amateur. Some security fella, working his way into the room, peering around, wild-eyed, and—

He stands in the doorframe, gun down, eyes darting. Finally lifts a hand to the comms piece in his ear and says: “The asset’s gone.”

Couple of seconds of silence—Steve would pay folding money to hear the other side of this conversation, but he needs his sorcery more than he needs 230 pounds of muscle right now—and then: “What I said, I—sir. He’s gone. Room’s empty. He didn’t come out the door, we never lost the hallway feed, but—”

The goon flinches, grimaces, goes silent again, listening for a long minute, and then says, “Sir. I’ll, uhh, I’ve secured the room.”

Drops his hand from the earpiece and rubs at his face and mutters, “Jesus Christ, they’re gonna kill me.”

*******

Ends up being twelve minutes, thirteen minutes—

—and the room’s fulla guys, some of ‘em in generic cheap suits, security goons. A few more in slick black tactical gear, armour, no insignia.

Steve can’t—he’s running on fumes, vision keeps greying out—he can’t see much, is only catching snatches of talk. Which is—Christ, he could kill every cocksucker in this room in cold blood and sleep after like the innocent dead.

This is Hydra, everyone in here has gotta be Hydra, because regular folks don’t—don’t—

First thing that happened when they started filtering in was one of the guys in armour pulled a gun from his hip holster and shot the first security asshole, Mr Amateur Hour, neatly through the meat of his thigh.

The guy dropped, howling through clenched teeth, moaned on the floor clutching at his thigh for a good couple minutes—and everyone walked around him, stepped over him like he wasn’t there.

One of the suited guys stands over Amateur Hour, drops into a casual squat and slaps him, back of his hand, hard, square across the face—“Shit’s sake, man,” he says, low and firm, like he’s disciplining a dog. “Take your licks with some dignity. You knew the punishment for failure.”

Amateur Hour goes quiet after that, and—and Steve can hear snatches of conversations happening around the room, quietly and urgently—

“—through the vents?” one guy is asking, poking at a grill high on the wall with the business end of his baton, and—

“Fuck, pal. A newborn infant couldn’t infiltrate this place through the ventilation shafts. They’re Goddamn tiny. What kind of action movie bullshit—” someone answers, immediate and mocking, and—

“—possibility that the asset may have gone rogue,” another guy is saying, slow and careful, and—

“Jesus,” the guy he’s talking to says—they’re both in the armoured tac gear, but Steve can’t see any more’n that, not with his eyes greying out and the Goddamn workbench covering half his field of vision. “Don’t let the Secretary hear you talking like that.”

Steve sharpens up— _the Secretary_? Who—sounds like someone important, maybe the asshole at the top of this Goddamn heap of shit—but they’re done talking, break apart and move away, and—

Steve’s listening, listening with everything he’s got—his ears, his extra senses, listening for songs, for intel, anything he can use to find these cocksuckers again. _The asset_ , they keep saying—like Bucky’s a fuckin’ desktop computer, a piece of equipment misplaced.

And he’s holding, holding his veil together, last wisps of magic, and his hands are shaking and his head aches, deep and dull, like someone’s stuck a fist in through the base of his skull and is opening their fingers, slow, pulping brain matter and—

Bucky’s pulse stays slow, steady. Out cold, his face at ease, he could be—he could be Sergeant Barnes, of the Howling Commandos. He could be that guy from Brooklyn. His song is slurry slow and awful, saw teeth biting into bone—

“ _We’re good,_ ” Tony’s voice says, and Steve jumps again like some kinda fuckin’ idiot, almost clocks his head on Bucky’s chin. “ _Fleeced ‘em, we’ve got everything. You all good to, uhh, exodus yourself?_ ”

This is gonna be a Goddamn shitshow. “Yeah, I’m peachy,” Steve rasps into the comms, watching Bucky’s face as he speaks—no movement, no flicker of life, still out like a light.

Takes a couple minutes of deep breathing, doing a couple centring exercises and getting his shit together—Christ, but he’s done in, limp as cooked spaghetti, but lying down and dying is not an option, so—anchors the veil in place over Bucky, pinning it to the workbench, to the floor, to the metal clips on Bucky’s suit, and then—

The last of his dermal piercings, at the very bottom of his sternum, is an emergency quick-deploy walking veil. He pulls the rabbit outta the hat, veils himself and drags his carcass back across the room to the server. Most of the Hydra goons have cleared out again, off to search the building or microscopically scan all the security footage or jerk off while reading treatises on eugenics, so there’s just the four guys Steve’s gotta crawl past, and then—

Grabs Stark’s remote access doo-dah—no evidence, no trail left behind—and jams it into his jeans pocket and heaves himself back over to Bucky—to the empty patch of linoleum where he left Bucky—

—and Steve has about twelve fuckin’ heart attacks before— _he’s veiled, dumbass, and you’re on the outside of the veil. Of course you can’t see him_ —and the veil is still humming away, muted and muttering, so—

Bucky’s still there, still unconscious, pale face turned towards the wall. Thank fuck, thank Christ, thank all the saints and all the little fishes.

Steve checks his pulse again, checks his breathing, listens to his song—stable, steady, but—but only God knows when that’ll change, when he’ll wake up swinging. They need to be the Hell outta here before that happens.

His topmost dermal is a shape change spell, get him back to his Cap shape. He takes too Goddamn long to knot his own veil to the veil over Bucky, hook ‘em together, and then—

Shifts over into his Cap shape, still veiled. Scoops the Winter Soldier up like a 300-some pound sack of beans and carries him out of the server room.

It’s a long walk—he’s so Goddamn tired, even in his Cap shape, hysterical exhaustion running bone deep and he’s shaking, twitching, heartbeat hiccuping like he’s got Goddamn palpitations again. The corridors are full of security goons, checking room to room and he’s gotta weave around ‘em, duck past them—

Up to the first floor and—

He’s halfway down a corridor—heading north, back to the exit—when Bucky twitches, shudders, fingers of his metal arm curling, breath punching out with a gasp and then heaving on the in-breath and—

Jesus Christ on a cracker—Steve stops, flails for a second because how the Hell is he gonna—he can’t put Bucky down, he won’t make it back up again, so—the wall. Use the wall, _you schmuck, come on_ , and—and he ends up using the wall and a knee to keep a hold of Bucky, free up a hand.

Uses that hand to find the big arteries on either side of Bucky’s neck, fingers and thumb like Peggy showed him seventy-odd years ago, and squeeze down hard until Buck goes under again.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Steve’s chanting the whole time, like _sorry_ spends at all, is worth the fucking oxygen it takes to say it, and then—

And then on the move again, fumbling with the lock cracker to get through the door and blunder out, into the open air.

There’s security assholes everywhere, FBI or Hydra or both. He weaves through, staggering like a drunk, following the wall until he finds a flight of stairs down and out to the street.

Stops and looks—down at Bucky, unconscious again, milk pale, tangle of dark hair, shading of stubble over his chin—always did grow faster than he could keep up with—and grey of grit and dust worked into the lines around his eyes.

Looks up at the sky—still ink black.

It’s three in the Goddamn morning. Less than an hour since he walked into the J Edgar Hoover building. He’s outta ideas, outta go, out of magic. He’s the dog that chases cars with no fuckin’ idea what he’s gonna do when he catches one.

He’s got Bucky. He’s got no way of—of _fixing_ Bucky, helping him, finding out what the Hell is going on in his head and—

Heaves Bucky onto his shoulder to free up a hand and taps his comms. “JARVIS?”

“ _How can I assist, Captain?_ ” JARVIS answers, blandly electronic, and—

“I need you to patch me through to Agent Coulson of SHIELD,” Steve says.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editing this chapter handed me my whole ass, as you might have guessed given I'm a week behind the pace. Forgive me, gentle reader; life is absolutely cray.
> 
> Thank you so Goddamn much to everyone who have been kudos-ing and reccing and leaving comments. My whole worthless heart is yours. I'm replying to comments as and when I can, which is not often, but please know I'm reading them all and they make my little brainpan light up with the good-happy-sauce.
> 
> ***
> 
> Posting this one in the memory of Chadwick Boseman. May he rest in power. Wakanda forever.
> 
> ***

Ten in the morning, Inauguration Day, and Steve is in the guts of a twenty-thousand strong crowd crammed onto Independence Avenue, spilling into the side streets and—it’s loud. It was always gonna be loud, this many bodies crammed into one space—

BAST planned this protest with the precision and care that the best kinda generals use planning a campaign, an advance over enemy terrain. There are street medics and folks with bottled water, food trucks, signs and posters, two enormous papier-mâché puppets of Justin Hammer and of Stern, his VP, passing to and fro above the crowd. They’re smoking cigars that are nuclear missiles, streamers of red and black blood hanging from their hands and feet.

And all morning there’s been noise—speeches, music, folks with drums, chanting—

“ _He’s a Hammer, we are screws! We ain’t gonna work for you!_ ” mighta been Steve’s favourite, but now—

But now the noise is tapering off and half the folks here have got their phones out, staring into the screens, because—

“Holy shit-sticks,” says the lady standing next to Steve, and he looks over at the screen of her phone, at—

_WikiLeaked: NAZIS IN THE WHITE HOUSE_ screams the headline, and there’s a photo of the FBI building on Pennsylvania Avenue with cops and CIA crawling all over, rifles and body armour.

Another photo of Hammer—Steve recognises it from a press spot, a couple days ago; it’s not current.

There’s—the volume’s picking up again, everybody turning to the person next to ‘em and talking, voices rising all at once.

It’s happening.

Steve closes his eyes, breathes out—thank fuck, thank Christ and Mother Mary and Tony Goddamn Stark, it’s happening. They made it in time.

Coughing bark of—feedback noise, speakers squealing, and then—

There’s an improvised screen hanging off the side of a building—looks like nine white bedsheets, stitched together. They’ve been projecting up there all morning, images and video: names and faces, civilians, innocents that Hammer’s weapons have killed—here, on the streets, and in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria.

But now—now it’s showing news feed, ticker tape of text across the top and bottom of the screen, CNN logo in the corner, and—

It’s Justin Hammer, in handcuffs, being escorted out of his hotel. He’s sick-white, glasses askew and his face cycling through horror and disbelief and fury and—alphabet agency guys on both elbows, suits and tac vests, hauling and half-holding him up—

The speakers squeal again and then the audio kicks in, some lady journalist’s voice: “—after an FBI file leak this morning revealed that the United States general election results may have been altered. It is alleged that Justin Hammer was part of a conspiracy to assume control of the government by enemies of the state. I repeat—this is live footage of Justin Hammer being arrested, under allegations of treason—”

There’s more but it’s drowned out, every voice lifting all at once—howling, screaming, cheering, chanting, and somewhere the guys with the drums have started up again, furious pounding like they’re gonna shake the glossy stone fronting right offa these buildings.

Someone’s hugging him, and Steve’s hugging back, automatic pilot. It’s Nadya, one of the BAST organisers, brush of her tight curls against the skin of his collarbone and then the flash of a wild grin—and then she’s bouncing off into the press of bodies, her fist in the air and—

Takes a good hour for Steve to work his way outta there, reeling from high five to hug and about a thousand selfies with grinning faces in every shade of black and brown and gold and white. He’s parked his bike way the Hell over on New York Ave, outside of the immediate range of total fucking chaos from the inauguration, the protests, the counter-protests.

So it’s close to midday by the time he makes it back to his bike, cramming the last corner of a pastrami on rye into his mouth—first thing he’s eaten since—since—well, he got a cup of coffee from one of the nurses at Silver Bough when he was visiting with Peggy—

Gets to his bike and climbs on, ass in the saddle and—

—stops.

He’s been moving from objective to objective all morning, just—just focusing, staying on the mission, and then the next objective after that, mindless and mechanical and—

—and he’s out of objectives.

They’ve gotta—surely by now, _fuck_.

It’s been eight hours. Surely to Christ by now—

Hauls his phone out of his pocket and thumbs into his recent contacts. Top six calls are all outgoing, him to Coulson, three of ‘em unanswered. He’s gotta—

Steve taps to dial. Rings seven, eight times, and then—

“ _Captain Rogers,_ ” Agent Coulson is saying, salty and dry as the Gobi Desert. “ _I see from the two hundred tagged photos on social media that you’ve taken my suggestion to heart._ ”

Coulson’s suggestion was that Steve go home and get some rest. Which is a fuckin’ hilarious proposition at the best of times, let alone when—

“What’s the status of Sergeant Barnes?” Steve asks.

“ _Our team has finished processing the Winter Soldier,_ ” Coulson answers. Same as—he’s sticking with _the Winter Soldier_ , has been since—

Four thirty this morning and they’re in a parking garage—closest place with any kinda cover that Steve could carry Buck’s limp carcass to. There are dark vans pulling up, armoured, STRIKE team in tactical gear spilling out, rifles up, and—Agent Phil Coulson. Standing over Steve, on his knees on the concrete. Over Bucky, pale and still out cold, loose strands of greasy dark hair across his face, metal arm gleaming like a blade in the dribbling dreary fluorescent light from overhead.

“You got him,” Coulson says, professional and flat as a tack, but his left hand is working, fidgeting, fist opening and closing, and he’s looking Buck over, staring, examining. “How did you—”

He stops, looks again. Blinks hard, jaw falling loose. Breathes: “My God, that’s Bucky Barnes.”

But it’s _Winter Soldier_ after that, strictly business, bland veneer in place as solid as the plates of Tony’s armour.

“His name is James Barnes,” Steve snaps at one point—they’re in one of the vans now. Bucky is strapped down and jabbed with a fuck-off huge syringe fulla some kinda sedative, and Steve and Coulson are in different van and it’s making Steve Goddamn crazy that he can’t see Buck, hasn’t got eyes on—and Coulson’s on the radio, asking for an update on _the Soldier_ ’s vital signs and—

“He _looks like_ James Barnes,” Coulson replies, mild, level as an ironing board.

“Who the Hell else is gonna walk around with that ugly mug?” Steve asks, clasping his hands over his knees so he doesn’t start rubbing at his forehead or tugging at his hair or one of his other tells.

“Could be a clone,” Coulson says, unblinking. “Could be he’s had facial reconstruction. I’ve seen weirder things, working for SHIELD.”

And then the SHIELD black site—it’s some anonymous looking office block in Ivy City, industry and decaying warehouses on all sides. And the STRIKE guys haul Buck off into the belly of the beast, last seen disappearing into a lift still out cold and strapped to a body board, and Coulson railroads Steve into a debriefing.

It’s the biggest confection of Goddamn nonsense and lies Steve’s ever come out with in his life—because he can’t confess to having been in the J Edgar Hoover building, can’t explain how he actually took the Soldier down.

Spins some idiot fucking tale—an ambush, a fight, fists and knives and then a sleeper hold, the mask coming off, and Steve’s so fucking tired, shaking and twitching, only Christ knows if what he’s saying makes any kinda sense—

And then he’s politely but firmly kicked out—they’ve gotta _process_ Buck, get him checked over head to toe and locked down and now—

“I’m coming in,” Steve tells Coulson, hauling his bike keys outta his pocket.

“ _Captain Rogers_ ,” Coulson begins—Christ, this is gonna be good: he’s putting his best Mother Superior voice on. “ _Barnes—if that is Sergeant Barnes in there—has been an active combatant and enemy of the state for almost seventy years. I appreciate that you’re concerned for your friend’s wellbeing, but as of three days ago he was trying to kill you. The Winter Soldier is being held in detention, pending interrogation._ ”

“He was under duress,” Steve snarls, and—and shakes out his left hand, fingers folded without thought into a hexing gesture.

“ _I really want to believe that,_ ” Coulson says. “ _Do you have any proof?_ ”

_His song is wrong, broken_. _He spoke Russian and didn’t recognise me that time he shot me in the head—but it wasn’t my real head. It was an illusion, sorcery._ Fuck, just—

“James Barnes would never shoot a civilian target,” Steve says. “Romanoff—her trainers, Department X. They could alter minds, memories—”

“ _Romanoff is already in the loop. Her testimony is compelling,_ ” Coulson says. “ _But it’s not proof. Which is why we need to interrogate him, and why he will be held in Hulk-proof detention while that happens._ ” Heartbeat pause, and then—“ _I’m sorry, Captain._ ”

Steve takes a deep breath. Takes another deep breath. Presses his fist to his chest and centres his shit. Breathes out and says: “The last time anyone tried to get between me and that dumb jerk, I ended up invading Austria.”

He’s clamped down so hard that his voice comes dead, inflectionless, and he’s distantly aware that he sounds like a Goddamn serial killer but he can’t let any of what’s going on in his head spill into his voice.

He’ll howl; he’ll scream. He’ll claw his own fuckin’ throat open from the inside.

Coulson is silent for a long moment—Steve can pick up his breathing, the steady percussion of his heartbeat. And then: “ _Come in, Captain Rogers,_ ” Coulson says. “ _Let’s talk._ ”

Steve hangs up the cellphone, crams it into the saddlebag, and kick starts his bike.

*******

At the black site—

After Steve’s made his way past the checkpoints—discreet, low key, fellas in anonymous blue-grey jumpsuits with stun batons folded and tucked away under their belts—parked his bike in the underground parking, found his way to the lift and up—

The lift doors open into a foyer space, ground floor, and Coulson is there, hands folded together in front and his blandly professional half-smile pasted on.

“Captain Rogers,” he says, nodding and stepping into the lift. He hits the door-close button and then pulls a cell phone out of his pocket, holds it out so Steve can see the screen.

It’s Bucky.

He’s upright, conscious and—he’s standing in the middle of a cell. Wearing some kinda papery-looking blue scrubs. Matte white walls, fluorescent lights gleaming overhead. Steve can make out a toilet-sink combo number in the far corner, over Bucky’s shoulder. His stance is—it’s somethin’ like the low-slung stalk of a wolf moving into ambush position: shoulders hunched, knees loose and weight low in his hips. Staring fixed into the distance, hair a matted mess across half his face.

It could almost be a photo, he’s so still, but Steve can see the slightest shifting in his torso as he breathes. It’s video, it’s—

“This is live feed from the Winter Soldier’s cell,” Coulson says. “As you can see—”

“Jesus, Buck,” Steve breathes, and the fist-tight knot in his belly lets go, unfurls all at once. He’s okay, he’s up. Steve didn’t fucking—brain damage him, hurt him too bad with—with the stingers. With the light strangulation.

He’s okay.

“—he’s in good health,” Coulson continues. “We’re treating him humanely, Captain. Three squares a day, a cot, medical treatment. We’re not the bad guys.”

“I still wanna see him,” Steve says. “Talk to him.”

“I thought you’d say that,” Coulson says, flips the phone and slides it back into his pocket. Reaches over and hits the button for Sub-Basement One. “Director Fury would like to see you.”

Sub-Basement One is—is where Steve just came from, the parking garage, only Coulson is waving his SHIELD swipe pass over a blank patch of wall, up above the button panel, and there’s a soft beep and—the lift goes down.

The doors stay closed, and the back wall slides open.

Through and down the hall—doors on either side of the corridor, offices or storage space, empty, unused: no heartbeats or human noises through the walls. End of the corridor and—

Nick Fury is in—it’s a pocket-sized command centre, a half-dozen analysts at work stations, data rolling past on dozens of screens and flashing up, projected onto the walls. He’s at the top of the room, standing over a work surface with—it’s WikiLeaks, all the FBI data, a couple different windows open side by side.

Steve fronts up, falling into parade rest without thought, and Coulson’s drifted off to one of the work stations, giving them some kinda nominal privacy so—

“Captain Rogers,” Fury says, planting both hands on the table and leaning in, his single eye fixed on Steve like he’s studying him down to the DNA. “Look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t do this.”

Steve got his degree in lying studying at the feet of the Norse God of mischief, and he’s been working on his Master’s with the Black Widow. His face is smooth and unruffled as a swan gliding across a lake when he says, blandly, “Can’t say I’m following you, Director.”

“The FBI data leak,” Fury says, flat and precise as a scalpel. “Someone got into one of the most secure buildings in the world, stole thousands of files, and posted every bit of data on the internet. Tell me it wasn’t you.”

“They’d been infiltrated by Hydra,” Steve says. “It was Hydra, inside the government. About to put a puppet-king in the Oval Office. I feel pretty good about some concerned citizen exposing their dirty laundry to the light of day.”

“Concerned citizen, huh,” Fury grinds out. “Well, along with the dirty laundry, they shared thousands of files containing confidential government intelligence. They’ve saved us from Hydra at the risk of catastrophically destabilising political relationships around the globe.”

“Sounds like a desperate move,” Steve says, keeping his voice calm, level, and—

“Romanoff has come forward,” Fury says. “You knew about the Soldier, that he was Barnes. You knew for days. Just how desperate did you get?”

“I didn’t do the FBI job,” Steve says, lies, firm as the foundations of the Earth. “I have enough trouble with my Goddamn microwave. Don’t know the first thing about computers.”

“Maybe,” Fury allows, leaning up from the table. “But there’s maybe a handful of stealth operatives in the world who could have found a way inside the Hoover building, unseen, undetected. And you’re one of them. _S.R._ ”

Steve focuses on his breathing for a second, on keeping everything slow and deep and calm. Fury hasn’t asked him about the S.R. missions, not since Steve first approached him about joining SHIELD, more’n two years ago.

He’d asked then if—if Steve was willing to work stealth ops, to _use the methods_ that he’d used sixty-seven years before: the S.R. missions, sorcery and _seidhr_ and illusions and veils to sabotage and assassinate and steal intelligence and—

And Steve told him _no_.

He’d trusted Peggy, her and Buck, to know about who he really is. What he’s capable of. There’s no one in SHIELD today, no one in the 21st fucking century, that he trusts that far. No Goddamn way in Hell.

Not with—

If—maybe. If Loki hadn’t—hadn’t fallen through a hole in the world, stolen the Tesseract, and led an invading force into New York.

SHIELD’s first exposure to sorcery was Steve’s lunatic fucking father, throwing hexes at security guards in a secret SHIELD facility, killing dozens in a matter of Goddamn minutes.

Maybe. If Loki hadn’t poisoned the well. But he did—as Thanos’s sock-puppet—and there was no Goddamn way Steve could out himself as a sorcerer—as a _seidhkonur_ —after that.

So Steve said _no_ , and Fury hasn’t asked since.

Until now.

“So it’s just an extraordinary coincidence that our STRIKE team picked up you and the Winter Soldier, at four o’clock this morning, maybe three streets over from FBI headquarters?” Coulson asks, toneless and smooth, from somewhere over Steve’s left shoulder, and he stifles the dumb animal urge to flinch.

Three streets was as far as Steve could hump Bucky’s limp carcass before he had to stop, exhausted and shaking, knees starting to fold like a bad hand of cards.

It’s so Goddamn obvious he might as well have left his signature spray-painted on a wall in the FBI server room, but be _damned_ if they’ll extract some kinda confession outta him.

Steve’s kept secrets—his _seidhr_ , his extra-human ancestry, his Goddamn queer proclivities—for more’n eighty years now. Fury’s sour-puss look is not gonna be what breaks him.

“I can see how it looks suspicious,” Steve says, agreeable, pasting on his most earnest expression. “But I’ve already debriefed, when we brought Sergeant Barnes in this morning. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

Fury studies him, silent, brows down, and then: “I oughta stand you down, pending investigation of this damn mess.”

“You got anyone else on the payroll with first-hand experience at rooting out Hydra cells, bringing ‘em down?” Steve asks, bland as unsalted porridge.

“No, I do not,” Fury says. “So I’ll use you. But I’ve got my eye on you, Rogers.”

“Understood, sir,” Steve says, nodding, and then: “Requesting visitation with the detainee, sir. I need to see Bucky.”

*******

Sub-Basement Three is detention—there’s a handful of regular cells, bars and concrete and cots, built to held regular fellas, and then—

And then there’s the box they’ve got Buck in.

Walls are slick, white, impenetrable. It’s all formed, toilet-sink-combo and cot emerging seamlessly from the walls and light spilling from overhead without any obvious source. The fourth wall is—glass, or something like glass, a foot thick and crystal clear. Getting in—two doors, like an airlock. The chamber between ‘em is tight, just big enough for one fella, equipped with an x-ray to check for contraband, weapons.

Antechamber is all monitoring equipment, a dozen screens showing thermal imaging and camera feeds from all angles, inside the cell and all the corridors, coming and going. Two guards, armed, twenty-four seven, keeping watch—right now it’s Agent Sitwell, little bald fella Steve’s met a couple times before, and Agent Tan, a younger woman with ink-dark hair cropped Marine-short—and—

And Bucky. He’s in that loose and predatory stance again, still as a Goddamn shop mannequin, staring fixed at the glass wall—he’s gotta know there’s people on the other side, even if he can’t see ‘em from his side of the glass.

As Steve watches, the plates of his metal arm shift, like hairs standing on end in the cold—starting on the back of his hand, rolling up his arm in a wave—and then lay down again, smooth and slick as a well-maintained rifle. The camera feed picks up a mechanical kinda whirring sound, plays it through the speakers, and—

“The arm is anchored with bolts to the clavicle and the scapula,” Coulson says—he’s brought up a couple scans on a screen, the inner workings of Buck’s anatomy, every private piece of his being seen and studied and—“Both bones are plated with a steel alloy. There’s more steel plating down the length of his spine—our doctors think it’s reinforcement, helps his body bear the weight of the arm.”

“Jesus Christ,” Steve breathes, not looking away from the glass, from Buck—the real Bucky, alive and breathing, not the version of him cut to electronic slices and component parts on Coulson’s screen.

“There are three metal plates embedded in his skull, over the right temporal lobe and the left frontal and temporal lobes,” Coulson continues, tapping at the screen to bring up another image that Steve doesn’t fuckin’ look at. “We haven’t been able to get any kind of functional brain imaging yet—he was still sedated while they were running the scans—but I’m told those areas of his brain are deeply scarred. They had to go to the archives to find anything like it—closest they could find was from autopsies, the earliest experiments with therapeutic ECT.”

ECT—electro-convulsant therapy, like—fuck, like they did to queer folks, when Steve was a kid: give ‘em a psychiatric diagnosis for loving somebody, arrest ‘em and hold them down and put electric currents through their fuckin’ brain pan.

“They were electrocuting his _brain_?” Steve rasps. His chest is tight, vision tunnelling endlessly in like when his asthma flares up.

He’s gonna—kill someone. He’s gonna fuckin’ kill someone.

“It appears that way,” Coulson says, tapping again to close the image.

Holy Mary, Mother of— _Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum—_

“I gotta get in there,” Steve says, spills outta his mouth like arterial blood, and—

“Fury’s cleared you for access, monitored, one hour at a time,” Coulson says. “With the understanding that you’ll be recorded, and the records used to establish our baseline understanding of the Soldier’s mental state—”

“His name is James Buchanan Barnes,” Steve snarls, low and wolfish.

“The _Winter Soldier_. Captain, I get it,” Coulson says, half turning to fix eye contact, deep and earnest. “Barnes was your friend. But right now we are talking about an enemy of the state and wet works specialist with kills going back over half a century. SHIELD _cannot_ afford to get this wrong.”

Steve takes a breath and closes his eyes and strangles the dumb animal urge to bare his teeth and get right in Coulson’s space, bear him down until he shows throat or belly. This ain’t Greenland—you don’t settle arguments with teeth around here.

And—and Coulson’s not wrong.

He’s _wrong_ —this is Bucky, without question. Appearances can lie—Christ, Steve knows that better than anyone, has built his life on the lie of appearances—but songs don’t. Souls don’t. This is James Barnes.

But that’s not evidence he can bag up clean and neat, put in Coulson’s hands. So—so Coulson’s not wrong. He’s just a whole lotta stops behind where Steve’s at on this particular bus line.

Steve opens his eyes again.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, we’ll play it your way. I, uhh—I gotta duck into the washroom, and then…” He looks at the cell doors, at Bucky, lets the sentence finish itself.

Bathroom is way back down the hall, next to the lift. It’s just the one cubicle space—only a handful of staff down here—white as snow. Unmonitored.

It’s the only space on this floor that isn’t being watched on one of those screens in the control hub.

Steve flips the lock over, puts the toilet lid down and sits, nests his fingers into his hair and tugs. Takes a couple breaths and centres himself, pulls all his flailing pieces back together. He needs to—

Bucky shot him in the head when he was Cap-shaped, at the hospital. Looked him in the face and then shot him, neat and clean and professional, square in the brain pan. But when Steve found him in the FBI headquarters, went to the Soldier in a seeming of _himself_ , his real body but younger—

That got a better reaction.

_“Doll,”_ Bucky said, hand out like he wanted to touch, and—

So _that_ fucking worked, which means—but Steve can’t go in there in his real body. Not with the x-ray scanners at the door—no Goddamn way he’s cunning enough to come up with a seeming that bulletproof. Which means—

Steve fishes his dog tags out, pulls the spell out and through—lurching howl of pain across his synapses, skin and bones, shrinking and withering and then the flood of the music hits him, lightning surge of his magic spilling through the channels of his body and—

Opens his eyes again. Reaches for the power and begins conjuring.

He’s seen Loki do this, a million-odd years ago when Steve was still a dumb kid in Brooklyn—weave a veil that hid him away from everyone else, but that Steve could see through clear as a pane of glass. Difference is—Steve’s knocking up a seeming, instead of a veil, but—look, how hard can it Goddamn be?

He needs a seeming, an image, himself, tiny baby Steve in suspenders and socked feet. Needs a veil that’ll hide—all of the _rest_ of him, the span of his shoulders and stretch of his head and neck, his Cap-sized body stretching beyond the edges of the seeming. Needs an anchor, something to hook it all onto. And he needs the thread of Bucky’s song.

*******

At the door to the cell, Steve stops, hikes up his jeans and removes the knife from the sheath in his left boot. Takes the other knife from his thigh holster through the hole cut in the pocket of his trou. Puts the two blades neatly side-by-side on the desk next to Sitwell’s left elbow—he’s staring openly. Tan is watching out of the corner of her eyes, stiff as a taxidermy rabbit.

They’re both, what—in their thirties? Grew up with the Captain America cartoon where the big guy in the flag costume saves the day by knocking some heads together and then giving a rousing speech about freedom. The idea that the real Captain Rogers straps on knives under his boring Dad clothes is probably derailing their trains of thought somethin’ awful.

Steve takes his dog tags off, puts ‘em next to the knives, and then he grabs the neck of his T-shirt and hauls it down far enough to show his topmost dermal piercing. “These don’t come out,” he says blandly, tapping at the metal to make it real clear what he’s talking about.

“Ah,” Sitwell says, pitched just a shade higher than his usual speaking voice. He’s hanging onto professional by the skin of his teeth. Tan’s face is jumping from horror to glee and back again faster than a speeding bullet, which is—more or less the usual thing folks do when they find out staid Captain Rogers, refugee from the Forties, has piercings down the valley between his tits.

Steve smooths his shirt out again, turns and gives Coulson a nod—he nods back, unruffled, leaning against the far wall—and then steps up to the cell door.

“Ready,” Steve says, and Sitwell hits a button on his work station.

The first door slides open. Steve steps inside, and the door closes behind him.

Half-second pause, dead silence inside the chamber—Hulk-proof materials at every stage of construction, according to Coulson, and Steve wonders for a heartbeat if they really tested that claim against the man himself—and then there’s the whine of the x-ray machine churning over, cutting to silence again, and—

Another pause—inspecting his x-ray, looking him over—and then there’s the thump of a magnetic lock disengaging, and the second door slides open and—

Buck, standing facing the door, facing him square on, shoulders hunched and weight low and coiled like he’s ready to fucking haul ass. Staring out from behind the curtain of his hair—for Chrissakes, why did Hydra let it get so long—hands fisting and opening.

And then he sees Steve and—blinks, and for half a heartbeat the blank slate of his face shifts and—traces of fear, confusion, in the shape of his mouth and around his eyes.

Steve’s seeming-veil sandwich—he can’t hear it, not in this body, headblind and deaf to the music at the centre of things, but he can _feel_ it like the lightest brush of static over his skin. It’s anchored to the brass button of his jeans, tuned fine as a thread of spider’s silk just to Bucky’s song—so no one else can see it.

The rest of the world is still seeing Captain fuckin’ America, six-foot-some with inflatable biceps and patriotic eyebrows, wearing his BAST T-shirt from the protest earlier in the day. Bucky, though—

Bucky’s seeing Stevie. Steve’s gone with himself around age nineteen, suspenders loose and hanging around his knees, stripped to his singlet with smears of paint and charcoal up his arms, his hair a bird’s nest from pawing at it while he works.

Hoping to Christ _this_ works, tugs at some frayed thread of memory in the Goddamn Blitzkrieg landscape of Bucky’s head.

So the half-second of fear, of confusion, bleeding over his features, and then—and then his expression levels out again, becomes…

It’s the same kinda look Steve remembers from the War, when Bucky was sniping. Not just sharpshooting, but really sniping, the target so Goddamn far off he’d have to fit the curvature of the Earth into his calculations, and he’d sit there with his little notebook and stub of a pencil and do the math, trigonometry, wind speed and distance and angle of descent and phase of the Goddamn moon and—

And then he’d put the notebook down, inch forward on his belly until his eye was at the sight, finger on the trigger, and put a bullet through a fella’s centre mass from a mile away.

It’s a cold look. Utter concentration. There is no room for anything human in the equations he’s running.

“Hey Bucky,” Steve says, all Brooklyn, same kinda way he’d greet the guy when he’d just come in the door from work, and—

“Who the Hell is Bucky?” the Winter Soldier asks.

It takes every Goddamn bit of training Steve’s got to keep his face neutral.

He’s gonna kill someone for this. He’s gonna fuckin’ kill a lot of someones for this.

“You know who I am?” Steve asks, calm and level as a lake in a valley.

There’s a long silence, Buck’s eyes darting to either side before he fixes on Steve again—he’s not making eye contact. Stares at Steve’s centre mass, like they’re in a fist fight and he’s watching for tells. Finally he lowers his eyes, looks away and to the side, shakes his head, once, and—and half-shrugs his right shoulder.

Not a _no_. Not a _yes_ , either. There’s something—desperate, urgent, in the set of his gaze, the line of his mouth, and—and for a second it’s so Goddamn like Peggy, like the look she gets when she’s groping around inside her head for a jigsaw piece of memory, like she just had it a second ago and now—

Steve folds his hand into a fist and squeezes until the knuckle of his forefinger pops. Breathes out, slow and very controlled.

“Okay, pal,” he says, mild as milk. “That’s okay. You wanna—let’s sit down and talk about it, okay?”

Another long Goddamn pause—and this fuckin’ chamber is sealed up tighter than a nun’s drawers. There’s no ambient noise at all—no street noise, no human background hum of people breathing and working and talking, hearts beating, bodies existing in space. There’s just the glacial-slow throb of Buck’s heartbeat, the whisper of his breath in and out, ribs creaking as they open and close. A low purring mechanical noise coming outta his arm. The whine of electricity coming outta the lights, walls, from everywhere.

And then Bucky straightens up, his spine one long hard line, gaze shifting to someplace over Steve’s shoulder, and he nods once, sharp as a blade, and then pivots, strides over to the cot and sits.

Okay, that was—Steve follows him, slow and easy. Remembers, sudden and visceral, some Godforsaken ploughed-up field in fucking France, sometime in—it musta been ’44—trying to get close enough to a feral dog to untangle the snarl of barbed wire from around its rear leg. Gentle, gentle.

Steve drops and sits cross-legged on the floor, just outside range of Buck’s feet. Keeps his hands visible, the lines of his body soft and open. Bucky’s watching him, his gaze fixed somewhere around the collarbones of Steve’s seeming. His posture is straight as a ruler. Same look of distant concentration on his face. His human hand, resting on his knee, has started twitching.

Jesus, where to start— _at the beginning, I guess._ “Do you remember your name, pal?” Steve asks.

Buck’s silent again. His gaze keeps—flickering, jumping to the side, like he’s half-expecting someone to be there, like—

“ _Soldat_ ,” Bucky rasps, flat as an ironing board.

Christ on a bicycle. “Okay,” Steve says. “I’m Steve. Stevie, you called me sometimes. Do you remember me at all?”

Buck—looks spooked for a half second, there and gone across his face like water bouncing off a hot pan. “I don’t remember,” he says, rapping it out like he’s reciting his eight-times table, and then—and then he pauses, jaw working. Adds: “Op-sec.”

Operational security. Like he’s talking about making sure you change your fuckin’ email password, and not—not talking about some Goddamn sociopaths taking electricity to his brain, often enough to scar, deep enough to purge the memory of his own fucking name.

Steve takes a deep breath, absently makes a couple of hexing gestures and then cracks his knuckles and lets ‘em go.

“But you know me anyway,” Steve says, because—because he’s Goddamn sure of this. This one thing. _Buck reaching out for Steve’s babydoll seeming, slow and careful; the single word, scraped out, muffled by the Goddamn muzzle—_ “You might not _remember_ , but you know me.”

Bucky stares—never quite makes eye contact: he’s looking at Steve’s ear, at his shoulder, at his mouth. He’s silent for a long moment, turning this over, and then: “You—you were my handler.”

Fucking _Christ_. “No, pal,” Steve says. “I—a long time ago we were soldiers together. Worked on the same team. And—and sometimes I’d do classified ops, and you were my field support.”

_And before that we were dumb kids growing up in Brooklyn, and you were my best Goddamn friend, and I was your best girl_ , but—but that’s too much. Too much all at once. Too much with all of fuckin’ SHIELD, their psych evaluations and lawyers and greedy Goddamn eyes, staring over Steve’s shoulder.

“Back then, I called you _Buck_. Short for—for Buchanan. Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, that’s what was on your dog tags. Is it—do you mind if I call you Bucky?”

Buck stares again, head tilted ever so slightly, like something in his head’s gotta shift to make room for this piece of intel. And then he blinks and nods, slowly, cautiously. Rasps out: “ _Tak tochno._ ”

*******

After—

After Steve’s allotted hour in the box, sitting like a schoolkid on the floor and flailing for anything, any fuckin’ thing to say—he can’t talk a whole lot about their shared past, not without treading on territory that SHIELD can’t know about, can’t find out about. Ends up explaining about SHIELD, where they are and what’s going on—

“SHIELD is what the SSR kinda turned into, over the years. It’s Peggy’s baby—d’you remember Peggy Carter? Agent Carter—she handled us, gave us our assignments when were doing side jobs in the War,” Steve says, and Bucky gives him this look like he thinks Steve’s hard of fuckin’ hearing and:

“I don’t remember.”

He musta said it like ten fuckin’ times. When he talked at all—when he didn’t just stare at Steve, at his ear or shoulder—still not making any kinda eye contact—studying, distant as the moon, flesh hand twitching in his lap.

And then someone shoves a meal tray in through a slot in the bottom of the door—it’s soup in a polystyrene cup, sandwiches, cut fruit, no cutlery—and Steve spends his last ten minutes in the box persuading Buck to Goddamn eat something. In the end—

“Listen, pal, they got you in an airtight box. If they wanted you dead, there’s quicker ways than poison. And if you wanna get outta this airtight box, you gotta keep your strength up,” Steve says, and throws a cube of apple at Bucky’s face. And Bucky snatches it outta the air, metal hand, and he’s almost meeting Steve’s eyes when he sticks the chunk of fruit in his mouth and chews.

After he’s done—and he stops too damn soon, eats maybe half a sandwich and then shoves the tray away. If his biology is anything like how Steve’s body runs when he’s Cap-shaped, then he’s gotta need more calories than that, more fuel, but—

“You’re my new handler,” he says, grey and toneless. It’s almost a statement, tilts uphill at the very end like it mighta been a question, like he’s groping around for a familiar shape, something he can recognise and hang his hat on.

“I’m nobody’s handler,” Steve says. “No more handlers, okay? And no more Goddamn op-sec. This ain’t Hydra, not anymore. I stole you offa them, and if they want you back they gotta come through me, and all of SHIELD. I’m your…” and he thinks _friend_ , he thinks _best girl_ , he thinks _doll_ , but—but if Bucky needs familiar, something that makes a lick of Goddamn sense in his hopelessly distorted worldview—“I’m your field support, Buck.”

And then it’s time up, Coulson very politely evicting Steve from the cell, from the detention level, from the whole complex, and Steve finds himself back in the parking garage, sitting astride his bike, hollowed out like a drum, like all the marrow’s been sucked outta his bones.

It’s—he must sit there for a half-hour or more, staring into the shadows and concrete of the walls like they’ve got any kinda answers. God knows Steve’s got fuckin’ none—no answers. No Goddamn clue what he oughta do.

He’s laid down his best cards and then it turned out they weren’t even playing poker and everything is fucked up beyond all recognition.

*******

He’s halfway back to his apartment when his cell phone bleeps and he almost puts his bike up onto the fuckin’ sidewalk. Hears the shrill cry and for a heartbeat he’s hearing alarm klaxons, emergency lights pulsing overhead and where the Christ is his shield, why doesn’t he have—

It’s—it’s his phone. It’s okay. It’s the phone.

Jesus wept—he parks illegally, kills the engine. Leans over the front of the bike and nests his hands together and drops his head and— _breathe, you stupid fuck_ , you need to breathe. It ain’t optional.

Squeezes, hard. Pressure is good, pressure helps but—but he’s Cap-shaped, and he can crush bone with these hands. He’s killed with nothin’ more than the clamped down pressure of his own two hands, severing skull from spine or pressing in on the ribcage until bone splinters and drives into the soft organs underneath, the stomach and lungs and—

He’s held enemy combatants by the throat, used the blunt pressure of his fingertips to choke off airflow, close the trachea, or—or cut off the blood to the brain. Apply pressure and hold until they stop moving.

Like he did to Bucky last night.

Steve swallows the tickle of bile in the back of his mouth, sits up again. Fumbles his cell phone outta his jacket pocket, swiping at the screen with hands that shake.

It’s an email, and he almost—almost drops it back into his pocket: not urgent, not now, but—but it’s a SHIELD email address so—

Trip. It’s from Trip.

_I wanted you to hear it from me first_ , he’s written; the greeting is generic, so he musta sent this out to a few people, to—

_I’ve just given SHIELD my resignation, effective immediately._

Steve blinks hard, swallows again. A car horn blares, and then they’re heaving past him, close enough the wind rocks Steve’s bike under his ass. He hunches over again—making himself a smaller target, like he’s in a firefight and not—not just in a regular fuckin’ shit storm. Keeps reading.

_So it turns out Hydra is still around. Turns out they’re inside the FBI. I’m guessing you’ve seen the news by now. So you’re probably wondering the same thing I wondered, when I heard. Just how badly rotted does your organisation have to be, you get infiltrated by a white-supremacist death cult and nobody notices?_

_The more I thought about it, the more I realised. I don’t have a single square inch of high ground to stand on, and say that SHIELD is any different._

Steve heaves a breath. Rubs at his face. _Jesus_ , Mary and Joseph.

Keeps reading and—and he’s jumping from phrase to phrase, pulling out the high notes, stopping where his eye catches—

_SHIELD’s motivation has always been gathering intel, keeping secrets, and that has always taken priority over seeking justice_ , and then a couple lines later—

_I have never been officially called to account with SHIELD for the work I do publicly with BAST,_ Trip writes _. Never officially. And, in the last six months, every leave application I’ve submitted has been denied approval. Every high-value mission I’ve put up my hand for, the team found someone better suited. I’m not being censured, but I won’t pretend this is normal._

_Someone’s going to ask if maybe it’s not the anti-racist work I’m doing, that people up the chain of command don’t like. Maybe they’re just concerned my priorities are too confused. And to that, I got to answer: BAST is working to stop the nationwide, unofficially-sanctioned murder of black, brown, indigenous civilians. Why isn’t that everybody’s priority?_

Steve closes his eyes. Breathes in and out, slow and careful. His hand is clamped so tight the case on his cell phone is creaking.

This is Steve’s SHIELD-issue phone. His SHIELD email account. And Fury just told him, in words of one fuckin’ syllable, that he was gonna be watching Steve like a hawk so—so he’s gotta assume some fucker is reading over his shoulder right now.

And Steve needs SHIELD a whole lot more than they need him.

He needs to—needs to catch Trip in person. Talk to him, face to face, somewhere the monitoring gaze of phones and security cams can’t follow them. Trip deserves better than the kind of blandly colourless reply Steve can give—over an email, over the phone, anywhere they can watch him.

Trip—he— _he ain’t wrong_ , is the thing. He ain’t wrong.

“Christ,” Steve mutters, and then he drops the phone back in his jacket pocket and kick starts his bike.

*******

At his apartment—

It still smells like blood. The stink of old blood has settled, sunk into the cushions on his sofa, into the grain of the wooden floor. He’s cleaned up the puddle, the smears, the footprints but—but blood _sprays_ , spurts, aerosolises and—there’s gotta be some he’s missed. There’s gotta be—

He sweeps the place for bugs, from the front door through to the back walls. The half-tub of spackle—from that time he destroyed the bathroom wall, taking the mirror down—is sitting out on the kitchen counter. He still needs to finish patching the gouge in his front entry wall.

Needs to touch base with Tony, with Natasha, with Sam. Needs to check in with Nadya, or one of the other BAST organisers, find out what the next move is—because Hammer might be going down like a lead balloon, but there are still thousands of weapons with his name on ‘em out there, on the streets. Needs to turn on the news and check his phone and—

He needs to be Captain America. Be someone folks can rally around in a world gone to shit.

What he does is close all the blinds, stand over his washing machine and strip his clothes off into the tub. Grabs his dog tags and shifts over to his real body. Prowls naked back into his bedroom and—in the closet, right over the back there’s his formal suit, his dress uniform, a couple of Cap suits he’s got for appearances, and then the anonymous garment bags, neatly zipped closed, with all of his girl clothes in ‘em.

Digs out the silk pyjama set with the booty shorts, navy blue with whirls of galaxies and stars smeared over the fabric, and shimmies his way into them.

Seventy-some years ago, almost all of his girl clothes were bought _for_ him—by Ulfadhir, and by Bucky. So it was complete outfits, dressy, expensive. Now he buys for himself—the internet, _so helpful_ —and he only ever dresses like this when he’s home, alone, locked down tight, secured. So it’s all pyjamas, loungewear, yoga tights, satin slips. Comfort clothes.

He’s taking a tray of plasticky freezer lasagne out of the oven—it’s good odds the cheese on top is the temperature of the fucking sun, and the middle is still lukewarm, and that’s just as good as it’s gonna get today—when his cell phone rings.

Steve backtracks to the hallway, drops the lasagne onto the wooden dresser, and goes fishing for the cell phone in his jacket— _Sam Wilson calling_.

Shit, shit— _Sam_. Last heard from in the middle of FBI headquarters at two o’clock this morning.

Steve fumbles, drops the tea towel on the floor, almost drops the phone in the lasagne, misses the call.

Stops. Takes a deep breath and lets it out, slow, measured. His hands are shaking. He’s probably gone about as far as he can get without sleep, which is—not fuckin’ ideal.

He’s—he’s got a head full of _Hydra_ , of Bucky Barnes with his soul torn out and scars lanced into the meat of his brain. Steve’s sleeping brain is gonna serve up some real fuckin’ delights tonight.

Which—okay, fuck it. One foot in front of the other. Keep moving, soldier.

Steve scoops up the tea towel, grabs a fork, parks himself on the floor next to the dresser and eats a couple bites of the Godawful lasagne—he’s not hungry but he oughta be, he knows that. Needs to put fuel in the machine. He’s spent more years of his life out of his body than he has in it—disembodied, in the ice, floating or borrowing from whales and wolves and sea birds and—

The spirit is weak, and the flesh is even fucking weaker.

Steve stabs the fork into the lasagne, shoves it aside, and calls Sam back.

“ _It’s the man with a plan_ ,” Sam answers. “ _Still alive, seems like?_ ”

“Hey, pal,” Steve says, rubbing at his face and letting his ass slide ’til he’s lying on the floor. “I’m real sorry about—last night. This morning. My Mam raised me better’n that. I was—I was kinda distracted.”

There’s a heartbeat of quiet, Sam processing, and then: “ _What the Hell—you answered your phone in the middle of a mission?_ ”

God damn, but he’s got Steve fuckin’ pinned down. “You kept calling. Figured it was urgent,” Steve says. “Christ, they mighta come back and shot up the hospital.”

“ _Again_ ,” Sam says, and then—

He debriefs about Cobalt, her progress—out of the ICU now, in the respiratory ward, awake and sore and alive, thank God, and Steve half-listens, lets the flow of noise wash against him like a warm ocean current, blurring with the songs of his apartment, his neighbourhood, Agent 13’s song from downstairs, Steve’s own song, the weird bubbling milk-and-plants-and-plastic song of the Goddamn lasagne—

“ _You okay, man?_ ” Sam asks, and Steve snaps out of his trance, turns the question over in his head, trying to find a way inside it, to—“ _I mean, they found_ Hydra _. In the White House. Inside the government. Here, and_ now _. That’s—that’s a whole lot to process for—anybody. But you—you’ve got history there_.”

_History_ —like maybe they’re talking’ about an ex-girlfriend. Like that time Steve flew a plane into a sheet of Arctic ice to stop a fascist cult from destroying the world to remake it in their own image, only it turns out he didn’t stop ‘em at all. Yeah, _history_ is one way to put it.

“ _So. Are you okay?_ ” Sam asks again, and—

“No, I’m not okay,” Steve answers, and he’s too damn tired and heart-sick to be anything but honest.

It’s—the thing is, Steve did his time in the cold, in the black of the ice. And it was Godawful, it was a shit show—but he can bear it, the weight and the memories and the nightmares and the empty frozen spaces in his chest and belly and bones, because he knows it was Goddamn _worth something_. He brought down the _Valkyrie_ ; he stopped Hydra.

Only it turns out Hydra just course-corrected, changed strategy, and seventy years later they’re still here, still working to distort the world into their fascist fuckin’ jerk-off fantasy.

And only Christ knows how many people they’ve killed, how many they’ve broken and hurt—like Bucky; _Jesus_ , Buck, _I’m so fucking sorry_ —while Steve was doing his Goddamn time in solitary and—

His head hurts, burning ache behind the eyes. Chest hurts, pulled tight like the muscle fibres are snarled into knots.

He’s not gonna cry. He can’t be that self-indulgent.

“I’m not okay,” Steve says again. “But, you know, what else is new. Listen, Sam, I…” and Steve’s—he’s thinking _Bucky_ , thinking brain damage and trauma, thinking—

“I’ve got this friend,” he says. “He just got back from—from a really long deployment. Between one op and another, he’s been at war for—for most of his life. I wanna…” He stops, takes a breath. Shoves the tray of gluey pasta further away.

Starts again. “I want to be able to help him, talk to him,” Steve says. “And I don’t know where to start. Is there—could you gimme some pointers, maybe?”

There’s a heartbeat of silence, and then: “ _Asking for a friend, huh?_ ” Sam says, and—oh, for Chrissakes. He thinks _Steve’s_ —“ _Yeah, brother. I’ve got an idea or two. Got time to talk about it this week, maybe? I’ll bring the beer, you get the pizza_.”

Thank Christ for Sam Wilson. This week—this week is complicated: Bucky in a Hulk-proof cell, Hydra spilling out of the woodwork, the ongoing analysis of the FBI data dump, threads everywhere pulling and—maybe—“Sunday night okay for you?” Steve asks.

“ _Works for me,_ ” Sam says, and it’s a couple minutes more, signing off, usual call and response of goodbyes and then—

Steve ends the call, switches his phone off, flips it over and pulls out the battery and the SIM, smooth and automatic—he’s only done this maybe a thousand fucking times—and tosses all the loose pieces onto the sofa. Gives himself a minute to just lie there, staring at the ceiling, listening to the night music.

He’s not okay. Bucky’s so Goddamn far from okay he’s off the far end of the okay-ness sliding scale and over the fucking horizon. And he’s not—he doesn’t—

Steve’s fucked if he knows what he oughta do. How to fix this. How to help.

He’s gotta—

Hydra, claw-deep in the soft belly of the US government. The FBI—Hell, the entire crumbling sandcastle of US intelligence. And tens of thousands of HammerTech weapons, still out there, on the streets and in communities. And Trip, resigning, pulling away from SHIELD when they shoulda had his Goddamn back. Tony, recovering from surgery and vulnerable. Bucky, brain damaged and bleeding out and—

Steve’s just gotta keep moving. Keep moving to the next objective.

Rolls over and heaves himself up to his feet and keeps moving.


	6. Chapter 6

“This is what we know,” Brock Rumlow says, pivoting the mounted screen so everyone in the back of the jet can see the factory floor plans, and—

It’s oh-four-hundred hours, also known as fuckin’ asshole-o’clock in the morning, and Steve is in the back of a quinjet with STRIKE Team Alpha, in the air someplace over—Indiana, probably, given what he knows about the flight path, how long they’ve been in the air.

He’d got maybe a couple hours of shut-eye, broken and shallow, before the pounding at his door hauled him clawing and swinging outta sleep. He’s gotta strip off his girl pyjamas and throw ‘em back in the closet, shift over to his Cap shape in mid-stride and throw on boxer shorts and a T-shirt.

Opens the front door with his shield up to cover centre mass and an awful kinda deja vu clawing at him from the inside of his chest but—

It’s Natasha, it’s just Natasha, in her Widow tac suit and shoving a tablet at him with—floor plans, video. Mission specs.

“Much as I admire your dedication to paranoia,” Natasha says, holding the tablet pinned against his chest until he takes the damn thing from her hand, “this would have been easier if I could have called you on this newfangled device the kids are calling _phones_.”

She pivots, strides back up the corridor. “Quinjet is on the roof. Wheels up in five, Rogers.”

Steve blinks at the tablet, catching a word here and there, and then—

And then he sees the analyst’s report on the enemy, what they know so far, and his hand convulses so hard he puts his thumb through the screen. Dumps the broken tablet on his kitchen counter and runs to suit up.

And now—

Steve tightens one of the straps on his shield, tugs at his fingerless glove so the _come-here_ spell anchor stitched inside—it’s a plain brass button, smooth and static-warm with the weight of the spell—is lined up square with the centre of his palm. Glances around the back of the jet, checking everybody over—tac gear, weapons, faces and body language, strapped in and ready.

“Target is a HammerTech manufacturing plant in Detroit. Produces arms and ammo for distribution to police and military contracts,” Rumlow is saying, tapping at the screen. “Eighty-five minutes ago, the factory was captured by a team of unidentified soldiers. Small arms, rifles, grenades, light body armour, maybe twenty-five or thirty of ‘em.”

Steve looks to the front of the jet. Natasha is sitting cockangled in the co-pilot’s seat, talking low-voiced to Clint Barton, codename Hawkeye. He’s eyes front, piloting, head tilted to listen to her, his quiver slung by the strap over the back of his seat.

Hawkeye on deck means there’s three Avengers on this one op, which seems like fucking overkill except for how—

“Our analysts think this is a Hydra cell. They went in after the weapons, but local PD disabled their trucks and they’ve taken hostages,” Rumlow says.

“Who’ve they got?” Steve asks.

“Guards on the graveyard shift,” Rumlow answers, tapping over to another screen: eight generic ID photos, seven fellas and a lady, HammerTech logos sewn into their shirt fronts.

“What do we know about inside?” Steve asks, and Rumlow brings up the floor plans again, blunt finger shaping circles and lines on the screen as he runs through it—guards posted here, hostages somewhere here, trucks blocking access here—

“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Steve says, and—

Half an hour later he’s standing in the open mouth of the rear hatch, howl of the jet’s engines like God open-handed slapping at his ears, two thousand feet up in the clear open air. Sunrise isn’t for another three hours and change, so the sky is pitch dark; the world below all shades of charcoal smeared with light pollution, regular lines of street lights and car headlights marking the city grid.

“Here,” comes from behind, and he half-turns to catch the parachute pack Natasha is passing over. She’s fixing the clips on her own pack, tugging and checking for give, as she comes over to stand next to him, stare out into the black.

Steveunhooks his shield from the harness across his back, hangs it on a cargo hook to his right, shrugs into his pack and adjusts the straps to fit.

“So,” Natasha says, faux-casual and loud enough to be heard past the whining howl of the quinjet. “How about that local sports team?”

Steve ducks his head, rubs at his mouth where the corners are twitching, pulling. Fastens the clip across his chest. They—they’d started this one during ops with STRIKE Charlie—they’re obsessed with college football, every damn one of ‘em, and the pre- and post-mission conversation can get pretty esoteric if you’re not also real fuckin’ invested and—

It’s their call and response, him and Natasha. Their check in: both on the same page, eyes up and facing front.

“I too enjoy sports,” Steve says, completing the formula, and Natasha nods like he’s just revealed the secrets of the universe.

God forbid she just ask _are you okay_ like some kinda plebe.

“Coulson has read me in on Barnes,” she says, and Steve strangles his dumb animal flinch. “So. That sucks.”

“It really does,” Steve agrees, reefing at the straps of his chute to check—secure.

“I don’t have any kind of _Idiot’s Guide_ to getting deprogrammed,” Natasha says. “But I lived through it. Got the T-shirt. And if you need someone to drink heavily with, it’s kind of my area of expertise.”

“Appreciate it,” Steve says, picks up his shield again, and then—

“ _In position. I have a shot_ ,” Clint says over the comms, and Steve rolls his neck and breathes out and steps forward into thin air.

Freefall, mad rush like all his squishy organs are slamming up into his collarbones and all he can hear is the roar of the wind and his heart convulsing in his chest like a war drum—

—and then Steve pulls the chute release and—

Liquid lurch of the sudden _stop_ , muscle and bone screaming strain as the chute tears _up_ and gravity tears _down—_

_—_ and then he’s floating, drifting down, easy as pie, tugging at his steering lines. There, down there, ocean of light sparked with red and blue where the cops have a perimeter around the factory.

_Crack_ somewhere behind and overhead, Natasha’s chute deploying, the soft _umph_ punched out of her lungs that he can just hear past the moan of the air slapping at his ear drums.

Detroit at asshole o’clock in the morning is spread out like a rumbled tablecloth below, concrete and tarmac and ribbons of light against the dark where the streets run through.

Coming up fast—he twitches at his steering lines again, course corrects, dropping swift and smooth—

Factory, ugly concrete blockish buildings sandwiched together, empty lots and urban decay to either side and the ring of cop cars and armoured vans traced around, spotlights pooling harsh halogen white like lightning poured over the black of the roads and—

Factory, spilling wider as he drops, closer and closer, tugs at a steering line one last time to line it up—silver and black square of the skylight immediately below—before he lets the lines go, finds the emergency release for his chute with one hand and taps open the comms line with the other.

Deep breath. Here we go.

“Mark,” Steve says into the comms, and—

Jams his thumb into the emergency release and—and he’s falling, hiccuping _whoosh_ of the chute flapping free as it comes away from the harness, he’s falling, tucking to take the landing on his shield—

_Crash_ of shattering glass below, one-two, so close together it’s one sound—Natasha putting a bullet through the skylight, Clint putting an arrow through one of the guards on the catwalk level of the factory, and somewhere below there’s a broken yelp of pain and then—

—and then Steve’s through the skylight and dropping like a Goddamn rock, curled into the curve of his shield—flash of the factory interior, catwalk and huge industrial machines and scattered Hydra goons, caught flinching and half turning, dumb animal instinct and—

_Craaaang—_ vibranium on concrete and he’s rolling across the shield, soaking up the momentum and coming up on his feet—Christ, but that hurts. Couple fractured ribs down his right side, probably. A shop-standard human would be fuckin’ dead, more broken bones than whole ones after falling something like four stories outta the open air.

Up on his feet and _moves_.

He’s in the middle of the factory floor. There’s maybe fifteen mooks down here with him, another half-dozen up on the catwalk level—one of ‘em sagging over the railing, falling, shaft of an arrow sticking clean out of his neck. They’re all half-frozen, reeling, and there’s— _there_ , back wall, the door into the office where they’re holding the hostages.

Steve _runs_ , explosive, shield up and—crack of gunfire, the squids eyes up and starting to respond—can hear bullets snapping past like pissed off metal hornets but he’s moving too fast for ‘em to aim and—

Three guys dead ahead, between him and the door, guns up—

Steve twists and heaves and _throws_ , sends the shield flying—catches the first guy in the chest, clean, and he’s sprawling back, arms out, down like a sack of beans.

Hand out and—and Steve _tugs_ , pulls at the _come-here_ spell anchored in his glove, and the shield shoots back into his hand on the rebound, mid stride, and he’s still moving forward, smooth as melted butter.

Shield up and—and the fella in the middle fires, handgun pointed square at Steve’s face and he’s—it’s snooker, it’s easy, pennies from heaven, it’s just _angles_ , and his brain ticks over more’n human fast when he’s like this—Steve cocks the shield just so and—

Clap of the bullet hitting the shield and bouncing, and then the squid on the left goes down, squealing, friendly bullet coming back and punching through his knee like it’s going through paper and—

Steve ploughs shield-first into the middle guy, last man standing, hits like a mid-size truck and keeps going, aware in a distant kinda way of the crunch of bones breaking past the howl of bullets, the sucking-roar of his own heartbeat crashing in his ears and—

And he’s at the door—maybe six seconds after he first hit the floor. Gotta move fast, gotta get in there _now_ , right the Hell _now_ —

At the door and through, head down and shield up and punching through the layered wood of the door—crunch of wood shearing from metal—and then he’s in the office, still moving forward.

There—hostages, all of ‘em sitting on their hands over behind the desk, and—and two squids in here, standing over the hostages. One of ‘em is frozen, staring at Steve, and the other guy lifting a gun, bringing it up to level at a hostage’s fucking face.

Steve finds another gear—faster _now now_ —howling pain up his calves, thighs, into the cradle of his pelvis, shifting course to put this asshole square in his sights and then—

Crunch of metal on bone, slamming his shield into the guy’s torso, chest, the whole of Steve’s weight and Goddamn momentum behind it and shoving, heaving, driving the squid into the far wall _hard_ , hard enough the plaster splits and bones splinter and the iron-ammonia reek of spilled blood and piss hits the air.

Stop. Step back. The squid drops, dead weight, and Steve turns, looks for the other guy, second target—

He’s fumbling, hands out in front, flicking on the safety of his gun and throwing it outta reach, dropping to his knees like someone’s cut his puppet strings.

“Oh fuck,” the squid’s saying, low and slurred with panic. “Oh fuck, I’m surrendering.”

What—what the Hell kinda—Steve stares for a whole heartbeat—the guy’s young, maybe in his twenties, and black—and he’s black and in a fuckin’ white supremacist organisation? What the Hell even—

Steve shakes his head and strides forward, scooping up the gun and tossing it underhand to—one of the hostages is getting up, uncurling, catches the gun on the fly with shaking hands.

“Hold him,” Steve says, pointing at the—at the prisoner. Christ on a crutch, since when did Hydra goons _surrender_ —and then he’s tapping at his comms unit—“Hostages secured,” he tells the team, moving for the door, what’s left of the door, back out to the factory.

Out on the factory floor there’s—some mook ducking out from behind a machine, handgun levelled at Steve—puts his shield up to deflect the bullet, assessing.

There’s maybe a dozen bodies on the floor that he can see, one slumped across the top of some kinda cutting machine with an arrow sticking out of his face. Catwalks are cleared—couple limp bodies up there, no threats. Some asshole blunders out into the open with—yeah, that’s some loose parachute fabric, snarled around his head and upper body.

The fellas Steve can see are all guns up, moving around for position, looking over at—there’s a big bank of machines over by the east wall, and from behind ‘em Steve’s hearing gunfire, grunting, yelps of pain. And then a squid falls into view, shrieking, Natasha riding him down to the ground with her stingers planted into the guy’s neck.

She rolls free—comes up firing—keeping ‘em occupied, keeping ‘em away from the hostages, keeping ‘em busy until—

Gunfire—clatter of bullets, sound coming through the wall. The loading bay next door—

And then the STRIKE team are spilling in, coming through from the loading bay at the rear like a sea of ink-black armoured ants, rifles up and—

It’s over real quick after that.

*******

“These guys aren’t Hydra,” Steve is saying, most of his hand wedged in a guy’s mouth feeling for a fake tooth, a suicide pill.

Clean up means: bodies in a pile, the injured cuffed and into ambulances, the living searched and cuffed and into SHIELD’s armoured vans, weapons catalogued and some kid from the local PD on broom sweeping up fallen shards of glass. In a few hours it’s gonna mean paperwork, debriefing and filing the reports, tallying up numbers—hostages saved, bullets fired, casualties.

And Steve’s gonna have a couple things to Goddamn say when he files his reports, because how in Mother Mary’s holy name did some analyst think—

“No way these guys are Hydra,” he says, hauling his hand outta the guy’s mouth—missing tooth on the upper left, but no suicide pill. Wipes his hand on the guy’s shirt front.

“I _told_ you,” the guy complains, working his jaw and tongue like he didn’t enjoy Steve’s amateur dentistry— _you and me both, pal_. “I’m not some fuckin’ Nazi.”

“Save it for your lawyer,” Steve says, and closes the van door before anybody has time for a comeback—there’s four of ‘em in there, cuffed and stripped of their weapons, armour, hunched and looking collapsed in on themselves like old houses sagging in on their foundations. But they’re alive—them, and the twelve other guys spread out over another couple vans, which—

They’re not Hydra—they’re alive, they surrendered.

Hydra _never_ surrender—that was their fuckin’ verse and chorus, every damn time back in the War— _no surrender_ , _niemals kapitulieren_ , and then they’d throw themselves at you until you put ‘em down, or they’d eat a bullet from their own gun, or they’d—Steve learned to recognise the movement of the jaw that meant they were finding their suicide pill and biting down on it.

They’re _fanatics_. They don’t—

But these guys threw down arms and found their knees real quick once STRIKE hit the factory floor. And they’re—it’s mostly white fellas but there’s some black and brown faces in there, which—it ain’t _impossible_ that Hydra’s updated their hiring policies in the last seventy years, but it also ain’t all that likely.

“So who the Hell are they?” Steve asks the room, asks no one in particular, and—

“Mercenaries,” Clint says, coming over from—he’s been looking over the corpses, weapons and tac gear and—he’s got a Kevlar vest in each hand, holds ‘em up so Steve can see. There’s wear and tear, scuff marks dug into the straps and—and they’re different, different brands and styles. Not a uniform, which means they’re not part of any kinda regular unit. “So—next question is who hired ‘em?”

“Somebody wanted an arsenal,” Steve says, looking over at the crates of weapons, stacked roughly against the wall, HammerTech logos and number codes pasted on the sides. “There’s, what, twelve units in a crate, fifty-six crates they’d loaded in the back of their trucks—”

“Enough weapons to cause a whole lotta trouble,” Clint says, eyeballing the crates. It’s cute that he’s pretending he hasn’t already done the math, come back with an exact number. Clint’s a sniper; he does complex trig equations in his head while he’s getting shot at, falling off a building, on fucking fire. Makes out like he’s all corn-fed muscle, never did finish school, solid but not all that bright, and that’s as much of a lie as Steve’s inflatable biceps.

“Not as much trouble as you might think,” comes from—Natasha, meandering out from behind one of the vans.

She’s got some kinda—it’s one of the HammerTech guns, massive and boxy with an open square mouth at the business end like a Hydra laser rifle had a Goddamn ugly baby with a photocopier. She’s gotta use both hands to hold the damn thing.

“Introducing the ShowStopper,” Natasha says, hefting the gun up to cock the weight of it up against her shoulder. “HammerTech’s debut diva in their new line of compliance tech, for non-lethal crowd control and criminal suppression.”

There’s a heartbeat of silence, of processing, and then—“ _Debut diva_ ,” Clint says, lingering over the syllables like he’s enjoying ‘em a little too much, and—

“ _Non-lethal_?” Steve repeats. “So—what the Hell is it? Some kinda sonic canon?”

“I have no idea. It doesn’t work,” Natasha says, rolling it in her grip again to cradle the massive gun in both arms. “It’s unloaded, or—I don’t know if it needs a powerpack, or needs some kind of ammunition loaded in, but it’s dead. I’ve been dry-firing it at a wall for the last ten minutes.”

“Huh.” Steve puts a hand out and Natasha passes the gun over. It’s even heavier than it looks, ugly, glossy grey panels with lines of gold chasing like speed stripes painted on the side of some kid’s piece-of-shit racer. Weight feels off, distributed weird, some kinda awkward no matter how you hold it.

For a second, Steve—if he could slip into his other body. Into his real body. If he could just _listen_ to the damn thing, hear its song and get a feel for it that way. Its song, its—it _feels_ weird. Just—Goddamn not right, like the hairs on the back of his hands wanna stand on end from touching it.

What the Hell does this thing do?

“So—did they screw up?” Clint asks, nodding at the vans, the mercenaries cuffed inside. “Lousy intel? Who goes to this kinda trouble to steal an arsenal of non-lethal weapons?”

Natasha takes the gun back, one hand on the grip and the barrel up in the crook of her other elbow. She looks like Holy Mary cradling the Son of God, if Holy Mary were an expert assassin and the Son of God were fifty pounds of metal and plastic stopping power.

“Let’s find out,” she says, smiling like a shark in blood-stained water.

*******

It’s almost noon by the time they’re back in the quinjet, cruising altitude somewhere over Ohio, and Steve’s taking a cleaning cloth and the edge of a fingernail to the dried blood caked in the hair-fine divots of the design on his shield, STRIKE fellas catching some shut-eye or cleaning weapons or on the phone, checking in with family at home.

Clint is sleeping, sat in one of the bench seats, his legs a loose sprawl in front of him, and Natasha is sat next door, booted feet casually crossed in Clint’s lap, playing some kinda game on her phone—muted _pings_ and saccharine electronic purrs coming from her direction and—

And then the phone in her hands buzzes and she sits up, eyebrows quirking, and then—her eyes dart over the screen, face going very still like she’s pulled a plug somewhere in the back of her head, all traces of personality draining like bathwater.

“Huh,” she says, after a couple minutes, and then she looks up, meets Steve’s gaze, lobs the phone over to him in an easy underhand throw.

“We’re gonna be busy,” Natasha says, dry and flat as a salt pan, and Steve turns the cell phone over in his hand and starts reading.

It’s a SHIELD internal alert—Steve gets ‘em on his phone now and then. All staff, Level Five and up.

_By order of the Executive Branch, in lieu of a clear Presidential mandate—_

_—in consultation with the World Security Council_ —

— _until the risk posed by the Hydra presence within United States Government bodies has been fully investigated and contained—_

_—SHIELD will assume control of all military and peace-keeping bodies until such time as_ —

“They’re talking about martial law,” Steve says, and his voice comes thin, at a distance, like some ventriloquist is doing the talking from a couple rooms over. “With SHIELD at the top of the dog pile. What about—what about Ellis? Couldn’t he be granted an extension of executive powers until—”

“Ellis has no support from party leadership,” Natasha says, slumping a little further down and adjusting her feet over Clint’s thighs. “Not after his Vice President turned out to be in bed with AIM. And now we find out Justin Hammer was cosied up with Hydra? There’s no trust. Nobody has clean hands. Investigators have already nailed down Hydra plants in the NSA, in the judiciary, in the Secret Service.”

She waves her eyebrows, tapping a fingertip meditatively against the band of one wrist-mounted stinger. “SHIELD is the only organisation that’s clean—so far.”

“Then we’re gonna be busy,” Steve says, looking back to the internal alert, bald text glowing onscreen under the SHIELD logo. It’s signed off by Director Fury—Nicholas J., full name like he’s gotta get the full weight and gravity of that middle initial in there—and co-signed by some guy from the World Security Council.

“Who the Hell is Alexander Pierce?” Steve asks.

*******

Steve showers off at the Triskelion, throws on the spare clothes from outta his locker, knuckles down in some disused meeting room on the fourteenth floor to do all his Goddamn paperwork.

On any other day—it’s a team exercise, Steve and Natasha or Clint or Rumlow or whoever else took point on the mission, and they do all the after-action reports together, talk it through, get coffee, spitball ideas about how they coulda done it better in hindsight.

Not today.

Today—he’s just getting it done, getting this shit squared away and filed, and only Christ knows if what he’s written makes a lick of Goddamn sense, but—

It’s been twenty-four hours. As of that ugly fuckin’ wall clock clicking around to quarter-past four, it’s been a full day since he left the SHIELD black site, since he last clapped eyes on Bucky Barnes. It feels like his skin is trying to worm its way free of his skeleton and take off for Ivy City without the rest of him. Like there’s a fishhook in his brain stem, tugging slow and patient and powerful as the drift of continents.

He needs to be _done_. Needs to be done and _gone_ and—

It’s five before he finishes up, scans all the paperwork into SHIELD’s system, takes the stairs down to the ground level because he can’t be closed inside the glass box of the elevator right now, he just fuckin’ can’t and—

Taxi back to his apartment. It’s right on peak-hour traffic, grinding and grim, reek of exhaust and the rubbery black dirt of tyres biting at asphalt, mile after mile.

And then home, and he’s fishing out the spare bike keys from his mailbox down in the foyer and mounting up and heading east.

Black site. Security checkpoints, one and two and through, inside, and he’s swiping at the hidden sensor in the lift with his SHIELD ID badge, mashing at the button for Basement Three. Can feel his pulse in his fingertips, pressed to metal and plastic, hear his heart beating liquid and urgent in his ears.

Almost twenty-six hours since he’s had eyes on Buck, and he needs—needs to—

Detention level, and he steps outta the lift into white, the endless sterile white of the walls, ceiling, floor, molded and flawless and smelling faintly of—plastic, or maybe—almost smells like the eraser on the end of a pencil. There’s nothing organic about it, no give to it, and—

And there’s a—it’s a _gasp_ , wet, thin, thin enough that human ears wouldn’t catch it, heaving and—again, again.

Mouth breathing, wet with spit, rasping in and out, coming—with an artificial edge. Through microphones, speakers.

The control room—the cell. It’s Bucky, it’s _Bucky_ —

Steve’s moving blind, following that sound, down the corridor faster’n thought, past the bathroom and the other cells, hits the wall and rebounds taking the corner into the control room, into—

It’s black inside the cell, ink black, lightless like the inside of the _Valkyrie_ when he’d been trapped under sixty feet of pack ice in the very guts of winter, no sunlight no warmth no way out and—

Every screen at the control station is lit up, infrared and thermal imaging, Bucky rendered Impressionistic in shades of red and green and yellow against the blue-black of the cell around him.

He’s curled himself into the gap between the end of the bed-shelf and the toilet, back hard against the wall and knees up, protecting centre mass. His metal arm—it’s a blood-stained amber kinda colour on the thermal imaging, cooler than the crimson of his head, torso, legs—is cocked over the fold of his knees, jointed fingers curled into a fist.

His right arm is—it’s curled in against his chest, fingers dug into—into the meat of his left shoulder, into—into the place where flesh yields to metal, into—

He’s got his fingers clawed into himself, gone as deep as the second knuckle, and he’s breathing—like a sick steam engine, shallow and fast and spit-wet, gasping, and the control room is so Goddamn quiet it’s fucking ghoulish, Bucky’s breathing coming through the speakers louder than thunder, louder than shells falling on Allied lines and—

“What the Hell is this?” Steve snarls, and the sound that falls outta him is closer to wolfish than human and—and the two fellas at the control desk jolt, like they’re coming up from a trance, like they somehow missed Steve flying in here at Mach Goddamn One.

“Uh,” says the guy on the left—they’re both new faces, fellas Steve hasn’t met before, hasn’t seen around anyplace—“Sense dep,” the guy says, bland, slow, like he thinks it oughta be obvious.

“Just softening him up some,” the other guy says. “He didn’t wanna talk to our interrogators yesterday, so Psych cleared the use of some mild persuasive techniques.”

He looks away from the panel, from his array buttons and touchscreens, actually looks at Steve’s face—and God only knows what Steve’s face is doing right now—“Mild,” he says again, smaller, thinner.

“Put the lights up _right the Hell now_ ,” Steve says, pointing with a numb finger at the screens, the control panel. “Christ’s sake, the Hell is wrong with you people?”

“This—it’s orders, sir. Captain,” the fella on the right says, shifting back in his chair like he’s trying to fold himself into a crevice in the seat cushion, and—

“New order,” Steve snaps. “Lights up, _now_ ,” and the guy on the left is fumbling at a touchpad with a shaking hand, tapping through menus—“Anyone wants to argue with me, I’m gonna take it real badly. Jesus Christ, the man was tortured for most of seventy years and now you wanna pile on?”

“If he was under some kinda duress with them,” the guy on the left mutters, taps into another menu— _Environmental Control_ , Steve reads. “You’d think he’d be more cooperative now he’s out.”

Something low in Steve’s belly coils so tight it hurts and punches _up_ , into his chest and throat, spills outta his mouth—

“You really think he _volunteered_ to have enough voltage put through his brain he forgot his own Goddamn name?” Steve grates out, and his hands make fists and his pulse is howling so hard in his ears he can only just hear Bucky’s rasping breath past it and—

The guy swipes a slider on his touchscreen. The lights come up.

Buck’s blue scrubs are black with blood from his shoulder down to his hip.

“ _Shit,_ ” Steve spits, and then he’s moving again, throwing himself at the door, hands catching the edges of the door frame—“Open up, let me through.”

“What the fuck,” one of the assholes mutters, and Steve can hear one of ‘em fumbling at the buttons again. Inside—inside the fuckin’ box, Bucky is frozen mid-flinch, staring, his pupils tunnelling down to pinpoints, and he’s so still he’s not—there’s no breath sounds coming over the speakers anymore—

Steve punches the wall. He’s distantly aware of the white-cold burst of pain from the bones in his knuckles, the muted crunch of—“ _Now_ ,” he barks, and then the door slides open and he’s spilling through, into the cramped sterile box of the x-ray chamber.

It’s—it’s only a few seconds, surely to Christ it’s only a few seconds, hum of the x-ray turning over and then—he’s still got his dog tags on, still got the line of piercings running down his sternum, metal button and fly of his jeans, points of bright lighting up on their screens out in the hub, and then they must decide to let him through anyway—far door slides up and Steve lurches through and—

Bucky’s up—he’s on his feet in the middle of the chamber, hunched in on himself like he’s hurting, jaw clenched, eyes darting, wild and wide and Steve can see the whites all the way around and then—

And then he fixes on Steve. And then he _moves_.

He’s—metal fist cocked up to swing and Steve’s ducking, falling back, hands up to block—more than human fast and—Godawful grinding scream coming outta his mouth and—

Steve hits the wall at his back, no room to move—the Soldier coming in, weapon fist hammering down and Steve blocks, deflects—

—howl of pain from his hand, from his broken knuckles, self-inflicted because he’s a fucking idiot and—and the ache slows him down, half a heartbeat—enough to—

Right fist comes through, liquid quick, catches Steve in the gut and—can feel something tear inside him—

—Christ, Christ, he’s gonna—

“Buck,” Steve says, tries to say, and then the Soldier’s metal fist ploughs into his ribs—

Right side. Still tender from falling on ‘em, landing on ‘em, back in Detroit.

It’s—solid _crunch_ of bone giving way and the blaze of heat up his side, followed by—howl of pain licking across centre mass, into the meat of his lungs, sucking breath away—

“Bucky,” Steve chokes out, and then he’s swinging again and—

Glimpse of human knuckles, flesh and bone and skin stained rust-dark with blood and— _this is gonna_ —

_Crack—_

Down and— _thud_ of the back of his head hitting the floor, meeting the railroad spike of pain from his face, cheekbone.

Bell ringing hard—all howling noise and shards of white and red across his field of vision. Christ, Christ Almighty—

“Please, Buck,” Steve says, mumbles past—mouthful of blood, inside of his cheek torn where it mashed into his teeth.

You’d think, after the ice, the wolves—

Shoulda known better than to startle a wounded animal, Rogers.

Bucky is stood over him, sagging against the wall like he’s—curtains falling, lights fade to black—“Shut _up_ ,” he grinds out, and then he drives his bare toes into—

Right side again, ribs again. Steve’s—there’s bone in through the meat of his lung now, he can feel it, sticky iron weight feel of slowly drowning on dry land.

“M’not gonna fight you, sweetheart.”

Bucky—his eyes are unfocussed, like he’s taken a hit to the head, like he’s seeing someplace else, someone else—

“Target, Level Six,” he slurs, knee folding, and then—plants his knee in Steve’s gut and drops his weight there, coming down. “SHIELD agent, enhanced.” He winds up, metal arm, and—

_CRACK._ Ice picks, blistering white pain from with teeth, jaw—“Exposure threat.” Metal fist comes back again, gleaming in the bald light of the cell, red smeared over the knuckles—

“It’s Stevie,” Steve says, shapes the words with his mouth—can’t put any breath behind it, any sound, lung fluttering in his chest like a bird with a broken wing and—“ _A stòr_ ,” he manages, and it comes up wet.

The Soldier—stops.

He’s—eyes hazed, darting, trying to—turning over the pieces of shrapnel in his head. His arm—whirring rattle of the metal plates moving, opening like the gills of a fish and then smoothing out again, and his fingers open and—

—and he’s focussing up, eyes finding Steve’s face, blinking, look of—confusion, and—and grief, hollowed out grief tugging the corners of his mouth down and—

And he’s—going grey. Going hazy, like—like a lick of heat radiation up off the cobblestones and tar in the dog days of a Brooklyn summer—wavering.

Everything is wavering, and—and Steve can feel his lung, his one working lung, start to flutter and fill, like he’s breathing in marshmallow—

Gas, some kinda gas.

Bucky’s—mouth fallen open, chest heaving, falling away—they’ve gassed ‘em, those mooks out at the control station, and Steve—can feel his spine bowing, at a distance, like someone’s put a rope around his ribs and is hauling up, and everything is sinking, swelling, filling in grey and—

Black.

*******

“No pulse. I can’t find a pulse.”

It’s—a woman’s voice, loud and crisp and clear past a confusion of—there’s shouting, some kinda argument or—and a roar, like the sea, like the howl of plane engines going down, down.

Steve is—he’s up and he’s—“Starting CPR,” comes another voice, and—

Not in his body. He’s not in his body. He’s in the corridor outside the control hub, endless blank white of the wall stretched out in front of him.

His body—he’s just there, stretched out on the floor inside the control hub, Cap-shaped and bloodied, three SHIELD agents workin’ on him—one of ‘em kneeling up, placing his hands, starting chest compressions.

Medics, maybe. Oughta be a med team on site, any SHIELD facility where operatives are deployed from or prisoners are held, as per the regs. Which… oh, Christ.

The prisoner. Bucky.

Steve’s moving in, passing through—“Where’s the AED?” the lady doctor is calling, looking up from—she’s holding Steve’s head back and straight, protecting his airway, vertebrae, and—he’s moving on through—the roar in his brain, his awareness, grinding on, droning and arrhythmic—past the control panels and screens.

Through the glass, into the cell.

Buck’s on the floor, on his belly and—couple SHIELD security guys in here, holding him pinned, fixing some kinda cuffs around his forearms. Eyes are rolled back in his head and he’s twitching, quaking but—

But breathing. Alive. Okay.

Okay—gotta _focus up_ , gotta—

Steve turns and passes back through the cell wall, back into the control room, almost ploughs face-first into—

—rotting flesh, face neatly bisected into living tissue and dead, blanched red and grey and purple, pale eyes, staring fixed and furious—

_Jesus fuckin’—_

“ _What_ is this?” Heidr asks, cold and hard as surgical steel and—

Jesus Christ on a bicycle, it’s Heidr. Or whatever the Hell her name really is. His aunt, undead, some kinda sorceress. Last seen in a SHIELD lab in New York, just before he woke up from the ice, after Greenland and the wolves and the _Valkyrie_ and his sixty-some years in solitary confinement as a frozen side of beef.

Hasn’t seen her since, because—well, he’s always figured it’s because she’s not quite alive, not quite dead. A spell, she said, to keep her whole while she waits out her own solitary confinement on some distant night-black acid hellscape planet. So—he was able to talk to her, see her while he was in the ice, because he was in the same boat: not living, not dead.

Which means—if he’s seeing her _now_ , that’s gotta mean—

Okay, so—that’s another slice of bread on the shit sandwich. Fuck, okay, just—

Heidr is—she looks well, for a half-corpse. Fighting fit, lean, wired, angry. Her ink-black hair is knotted into a loose braid. She’s staring at Steve like she might just choke him a little if he doesn’t come out with an answer, which—a voice. If he’s gonna talk to her, he’s gonna need a mouth.

It’s been a while since Steve’s had to do this—spin himself up a shape, a face, some kinda texture for the chariot of his awareness when he’s disembodied. He’s gotta—start with an image, a picture of himself, conjure it up in his mind’s eye which—it’s quick and messy, sketchy pop art version of himself, his little body and Grey Ghost getup.

_Push_ and _twist_ and then—and then he’s got hands, wrists, the feather markings and scarification on his forearms showing where his hoodie sleeves are shoved up. Got feet, a face, a mouth, a voice.

“Am I dying?” Steve asks, like some kinda idiot—asks Heidr, asks nobody, asks the fuckin’ universe at large.

“I don’t know. Do you _need_ a heartbeat to live?” Heidr asks, level, a sub-Arctic cold kinda furious, and she glides half a step to the side so Steve can see—himself. His body.

Still on the floor, still—they’re still doing chest compressions. Steve can hear his broken ribs grinding against each other with the movement—Christ, that’s gonna hurt to come back to. If he comes back to it, if he doesn’t—

“Mother of God,” Steve breathes, watching, Heidr at his side. They’ve cut his shirt open sometime in the last couple minutes, glued some kinda sticky pads to his tits. There’s wires feeding off the pads and into a soft-shell boxy little device—gotta be the portable AED.

He looks—he looks dead. Dead as Heidr, pale, mouth and chin a wash of tacky blood.

Christ. He’s really screwed the pooch this time.

“Hold CPR for the trace, please,” the lady doc barks—crisp English accent. Jemma, her name, he’s pretty sure—he’s met her before, a couple times. Dr Jemma Simmons.

The guy doing chest compressions stops, lifts off, and there’s a breathless moment of silence, everyone watching the screen on the AED, waiting—

“Vee-fib,” Simmons declares. “We need to defibrillate.”

“Oh shit,” Steve says, and then—

“Everybody clear,” Simmons calls, gives it a half second to make sure—and all three of ‘em are leaning right back, making sure they’re outta zapping range—and then jams her thumb down on the big ugly orange button on the AED.

Steve—it’s like a white-light kick to the centre of his sternum. He feels it—Holy Mary. He _feels it_.

Maybe not so dead after all.

Cold hand on his wrist—it’s Heidr, grabbing on and twisting like she’s gonna put him in an arm bar.

“Get back in there now, you little snot,” she grits out, shoving him forward, towards his body, the diorama of corpse and attendants knelt on the cold floor.

_I haven’t given you permission to die_ , Ulfadhir told him, a century or so back. God Almighty, the family resemblance is—which—that’s right, gotta tell her—

“My Da’s looking for you,” Steve tells her, half-twisting to look back, catch her eyes, and Heidr blinks, stops shoving, meets his gaze. “My—Loki. I told him about you. He’s searching, okay? We’re gonna find a way to free you.”

Heidr stares for a long moment, like she’s waiting for the punchline, like she didn’t hear him right, and then she cocks her head and smiles, her awful lop-sided smile, the dead half of her face still and unshifting. She lets go of the armlock and puts a hand to his jaw.

“Baby wolf,” she says, beaming down at him, teeth bared, fond and batshit kinda crazy. “I do miss our talks.”

And then her hand shifts—comes up so the heel of her palm is mushed into his nose, fingertips in his hairline, and she’s shoving, heaving him back and he can feel his body behind him, like a weight on the surface of the world, pulling and tugging at the matter of him like a riptide, and he’s falling and—

“Clear,” Simmons barks again, and then the white-light kick lands in centre mass, wildfire surge of pain flashing from sternum out to his fingertips and—

Black.

*******

Steve wakes himself up with a yelp of pain, little white spark of ache against the vast landscape of dull agony, flailing with one hand at his chest and catching a hand, small and warm and latex-gloved—

Cracks an eye open—dark skin and hair in a complex confection of braids and bun, dark pink scrubs. White ceiling overhead. Nurse, hospital, scratchy starched sheets sticking to his back with sweat and old blood.

Heartbeat pause, both of ‘em staring at each other, and then: “I need to take your piercings out, Captain,” she says, tapping with a fingertip at his topmost dermal. “You’re going for an MRI to assess the damage to your heart, check for brain damage after—after everything. So we need to get all the metal bits out. Are there—are there more, or is it just up here—”

Fuck. “No MRI,” Steve says, slurs out like some kinda drunk, thick with sleep and the caked-on old blood in his mouth.

Lets her hand go and tries to— _fuck_ , no, he’s not gonna make it up onto his elbows. Ribs feel like they’ve been crushed to fuckin’ powder, edges of bone working against each other, slicing at the soft wet of his tissue, his Goddamn innards.

Gives up and lies flat again. “No MRI,” Steve says again, clearer, wets his lips and looks around.

It’s—it’s a SHIELD medical set-up. Must be at the Triskelion. Private room. Couple machines, pumps, up at the head of the bed, drip running into the back of his right hand.

Steve pulls the IV drip out, presses his thumb over the puncture site—the nurse makes a strangled noise, chokes back whatever she was gonna say.

“What the Hell happened?” Steve asks.

Because yeah, Bucky kicked the shit outta him—but then he _stopped_. Steve got through, _something_ got through to him and he stopped, he looked Steve in the eye and—and if Steve tallies up the damage—broken ribs, some kinda internal bleeding, a couple good hard hits in the head.

It’s not enough to kill his ass dead. Steve is, for better and for worse, pretty Goddamn hard to kill.

The nurse looks—eyes dart away and down, lips thin out. Deciding how she oughta answer, editing, or—“I’ll ask Dr Bilski to come talk to you, okay?” she says, after a good three second pause, and then she’s hauling her latex gloves off, washing her hands with the alcohol shit from the wall dispenser, leaving the room.

Steve lies back and breathes, slow and deep and controlled.

He’s gotta—gotta keep it together. Gotta think.

He doesn’t have his dog tags. They musta taken ‘em off him sometime between the cell under the black site and here. Which is a pain in the Goddamn ass, because it means he can’t—

He can’t have an MRI. He just fuckin’—if he has to lie still in a shoulder-wide dark tube for the better part of an hour he’ll lose his Goddamn mind. Again, more’n usual. He can’t even manage a Goddamn lift most days, there’s no fuckin’ way he can—

Breathe. Breathe. Think, man, fuck’s sakes—

“Okay,” Steve says aloud.

Okay. Time to do something stupid.

Getting outta bed almost kills him. Getting upright, his weight under him, almost kills him again. He doesn’t have time to be delicate about it—someone’s gonna come in any minute, a nurse or a doctor or Director Fury to fuckin’ say _I told you so_ —so he’s gotta keep moving.

The bathroom is five feet away. He walks like he’s laced in a whalebone corset from nape to ass, and every step _grinds_ , bone shifting against bone, organs, soft tissue, biting down on his lip to keep from yowling like a scalded cat.

Into the bathroom and close the door, flip the lock, sag against the wall like a neglected house plant.

He doesn’t have his dog tags. Can’t shift back to his real body and heal this.

Not safely, anyway.

He _can_ still—how did Ulfadhir describe it, seventy-odd years ago? Like a surgeon, blinded and deaf and insensate, operating on himself from memory.

He can force the shape shift through. Headblind, hoping for the best—

Time to do something real fucking stupid.

Steve takes a deep breath, twists his big dumb Captain America hands into the conjuring gestures, and starts to hum.

*******

After—

The nurse starts pounding on the bathroom door when—

He’s done it, made it back into his real body, and he’s still slumped against the wall, arms around his middle and biting clean through his lip to keep from keening because—something’s wrong, badly wrong, twisted like God put a hand in the soft organs of his gut and then gave a quarter turn of the wrist.

“Captain Rogers?” she’s calling, yelling it through the door, and then he can hear—metal scraping, fumbling with the lock from the outside. There’ll be some kinda trick to get it open in case of emergencies which—well, this kinda is—

Jesus Christ on a cracker—okay, gotta—gotta—and it’s hard to think past the fuckin’ pain, dull but vast like it’s bigger than this body, spills over the outlines of him.

Jesus, he fucked it up real bad this time.

Gotta shift again. Gotta get Cap-shaped before company comes callin’.

It’s gonna hurt like Hell, shifting again after less’n a minute, and there’s no help for that. It is what it is.

“One second,” Steve calls, chokes out past the clamping hand of Goddamn agony clawed into his torso.

The dermal piercing at the very bottom of his sternum is a break-glass emergency Cap shape. He finds it with fingertips slippery with sweat, pulls the spell out and through and—

Walks outta the bathroom on his own two feet and wearing a brand spankin’ new Cap shape, upright and smooth as silk on a shoe shine. Comes complete with brand spankin’ new ribs, hale and whole and—

The nurse springs back from—she’s got a pair of scissors, using ‘em to leverage the lock.

There’s a fella over by the bed, baggy surgical scrubs and a stethoscope slung around his neck like a badge of office, tapping away at one of the screens over the bed.

There’s a heartbeat of silence—both of ‘em staring at Steve, Steve trying to stand so the shape of his fuckin’ dick in his boxer briefs is a little less on display. And then: “Captain Rogers,” the doctor says. “I did some reading on your healing factor, but I’ve got to admit I was not expecting you mobile this soon. How’s your pain?”

“What the Hell happened in there?” Steve replies. “Why do I feel like I lost a fist fight with Thor?”

The story—Christ only knows how much of it is real, how much stitched together. This doctor ain’t one of the guys from the med team that responded on site: he’s got it all at second hand.

The story is: when the shit hit the fan in the cell, the assholes at the control desk hit a panic button and filled the cell wall-to-wall with an aerosolised sedative. Experimental, calibrated for a super soldier metabolism. It was intended for use on Bucky, on the Solider, if he ever lost his shit, but they figured it’d be fine if Steve caught a dose too—seeing as how he’s a super soldier too.

On paper, anyway.

And then—“We’re not sure if it was some kind of an allergic reaction to the compound, but your heart went into a rapid fluttering rhythm that—”

“Fibrillation,” Steve cuts him off. “I had heart palpitations and a dicky valve for the first twenty-four years of my life, doc. You don’t have to use baby talk.”

“Ventricular fibrillation,” the doctor agrees, and then spins out the rest of the story—chest compressions and defibrillation and transfer to the medical unit at the Triskelion and—

It wasn’t an allergic reaction.

It was—woulda worked fine on a human, even a human with an accelerated metabolism. Like Buck. But Steve’s _not_ human, and his metabolism is spun outta whole cloth every time he shifts shape. Some mongrel cocktail of human and Jotun, with his sorcery to spackle-fill in the gaps.

“I highly recommend an MRI, Captain,” the doctor says. “Even with immediate CPR, it’s likely—”

“No, thanks,” Steve says, and then: “What do I have to sign to get out of here?”

An hour later, Steve walks outta the Triskelion in bare feet and a borrowed pair of dark pink scrubs—he’d used his last set of clean clothes from his locker earlier that day.

That _same_ day, which—it’s been at least a Goddamn year, inside his head, but here in the real world it’s nine o’clock at night. The city is a grey-black weight, lit up gold and silver and red across the water of the Potomac.

End of the longest fuckin’ day since New York.

He’s tired.

Christ on a crutch, he’s so tired. Should be buzzing, high on oxygen and the dumb animal strength of his body this soon after shifting into his Cap shape, but—

He could throw up. Could lie down and fall apart, down to the cells and molecules, on this glossy concrete floor.

Feels like there’s phantom pain in his ribs, in the bones of his face. Like an echo, a tickle with the razor-tip of a scalpel.

He—his—they were _torturing him_. They were torturing Bucky and then—and then Bucky put fists and feet into him, into the bones and meat of him, and that’s—

He should be hurting still and he’s numb.

Numb like in the ice. Numb like after the train. Numb like this is bigger than his body and he doesn’t have any Goddamn way to hold it all.

Steve rubs at the ghost of an ache in his face until it goes away, and then he walks down to the cab rank, gets in the front car, heads for home.


	7. Chapter 7

When Steve fumbles the SIM card and battery back into his phone on Wednesday morning, the Goddamn thing lights up and vibrates itself right off the edge of the sofa with notifications. Steve takes a long swig of his coffee, sets the mug down, and then scoops up the phone and curls up on the couch to start sorting through ‘em all.

He’s got his news apps set up to ping him every time SHIELD gets a mention in the press. And that doesn’t happen often at all: SHIELD operates so far behind the scenes that they’re outside the theatre altogether, manipulating events onstage from the sandwich shop over the street.

But since yesterday—yesterday afternoon, while Steve was locked down in a conference room ploughing through his after-action paperwork, and World Security Council Secretary Alexander Pierce held a press conference, told the world that SHIELD—

“— _will be holding this great nation in trust, until the threat that Hydra presents has been purged from our executive, federal and legislative branches of government. From our military and media bodies. These are trying times, troubled times, and I have faith that the people of SHIELD will be just that: a shield._ ”

He’s an older fella—maybe in his early seventies. Lined face. Silver-gold hair. Suit is tailored, looks like it cost more’n Steve’s bike. He speaks well, clear and smooth and assured like he’s announcing the sun will be coming up in the east.

Steve taps outta the press conference footage and silences the 3000-some notifications from his news apps. Sorts through his emails—mostly spam, a couple of emails from BAST—Nadya, trying to set up a time to talk in her first email, and then in the second—

_I keep hearing that SHIELD buy their weapons from HammerTech. We know that many police and military contracts are with HammerTech. Justin Hammer might be off the field of play, but if SHIELD is king now, does this just mean more weapons on the street?_

Shit. Steve sighs, puts the phone down and rubs his face—she’s not wrong, is the Hell of the thing.

Hammer and Stark were the two main weapons contractors for every military body in the Western world—and then Afghanistan happened, and Tony opted out of weapons, opted out of dealing death. And Stark Industries still make the best body armour and communications tech, satellites and engines and—but for arms and armaments, you gotta go through Hammer.

So yeah, SHIELD buy from ‘em. Not everything, not a lot—they do a lot of design and manufacture in-house, but—yeah.

Martial law is gonna mean more weapons. More Hammer weapons. On the streets. Pointing at Hydra, if God is good, but—but there’s no way of promising there won’t be any civilians caught in the crossfire.

“Goddamn it,” Steve mutters, has another slug of coffee, and then picks his phone back up and fires back an email to set up a meet.

Missed calls, three from Tony, one from Sam. Two messages from Bruce, who—last Steve heard he’s somewhere in Nepal volunteering with _Médecins Sans Frontières_ , and his reception is patchy at best. Sent a fuckin’ meme—one of those ones with the grumpy cat face—and then maybe an hour later: _oh shit just saw news. hydra??_

Steve sends back a picture of someone’s Golden Retriever in a Captain America cowl and goes through the rest of his messages.

Sam, checking in. Tony, in a screed, one after another— _Capsicle. Hey, Greatest Generation. Venti Iced Americano, pick up the phone_ —which—he’ll be sleeping now, Tony’s body clock is solidly upside down most days; Steve will call him back closer to noon. And then—

And then the phone vibrates again—new email from Coulson. _Special detainee status update_ —Steve taps into the mail, hand clamped down on the phone until a hair-fine crack appears in the protective screen and—

It’s—he’s okay, Bucky’s okay.

Still zonked from the fuckin’ sedative they dosed him with yesterday afternoon, so SHIELD are gonna _take the opportunity to perform a closer examination of the inner workings of the Soldier’s prosthetic arm,_ according to the email. Make sure there’s no bombs or trackers or any other mousetrap horror shit stuck in there.

Not that it matters a whole lot as long as he’s in that cell. It’s a Faraday cage, no signals in or out, and Hulk proof. If Bucky’s arm explodes, the only damage it’ll do is to him, blasted to paste and shrapnel chunks, red and black mist all over the clean white of the cell walls and—

Steve’s gotta stop, put his phone down, put his head between his knees and breathe for a couple minutes.

Fuck. _Fuck_. Okay, keep breathing— _Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum._

Okay. Pick the phone up again and keep reading—point of the email is in the last line. They’re expecting to be busy in there for at least a few hours, so no one wants to see Steve’s ugly mug until at midday at the earliest.

Which—fine. Fuckin’ fine. Steve can play ball. He can be a good toy soldier—or he can give a Goddamn bulletproof impression of being a good toy soldier, anyway. He’ll back SHIELD’s play—because he needs them.

Gotta keep reminding himself—he needs them, more than they need him.

Thanos is coming. Eye on the big picture, on the long-term play—the Mad Titan is coming. SHIELD, a united military response, is about the only shot they’ve got at avoiding planet-wide genocide.

So Steve can play ball with SHIELD, and he can keep Bucky safe for as long as this _special detainee_ bullshit trails on for, and he can solve world hunger in his spare Goddamn time.

Steve lobs his phone onto the coffee table and grabs his coffee and goes to make breakfast, and he’s halfway through scrambling a half-dozen eggs when the call comes to suit up.

*******

It’s Hydra, again. One of SHIELD’s analysts followed a paper trail back through the FBI data dump, back through land leases and bank accounts and dummy corporations and—

A Hydra base—or what looks like a Hydra base, on paper. Looks like an auto workshop or something from the outside—Steve’s swiped through the satellite images in the briefing pack while they were in the air, in the quinjet. Himself, STRIKE Team Beta, Agent Coulson, and another analyst—some whiz kid with a computer set up and some electronic toys.

There’s records on file—power usage at the site, going back ten years—looks like a concrete shack but it’s drawing huge amounts of electricity from the grid, steady and constant, with wild surges up at random intervals—a year apart, three months, two and a half years.

Christ only knows what they’re doing in there. Not fixing cars, anyway.

Takes a couple hours to fly out there. Los Angeles: home of the treacherous fuckin’ Dodgers, and also a bunch of Hydra mooks.

And then they’re spilling out of the jet, parked in the back lot of some disused warehouse space. More ugly fuckin’ industrial cityscape, torn gravel and a used condom under the toe of Steve’s boot.

They’re geared up and heads up, eyes front, working north and east a couple streets through parking lots and alleyways. This block was evacuated by the local PD before they landed, which—which will give Hydra a heads up, probably. Let ‘em know they’re coming. But Steve’s got Nadya’s email still fresh carved into the back of his eyelids.

If doing this job means gambling with civilian lives, then he’s not the man for the job.

Dame for the job. Demi-Jotun. Whatever.

They filter through, form up, a third of ‘em through each angle of approach—a couple different alleys and through the chain-link fence, in from the street through the front gate. Covering ‘em from all sides, no room for movement, for anyone to weasel out of the trap before it closes.

Nail down the Hydra complex from every angle and—

And it’s quiet. Dead quiet. They’ve been here—boots on the ground, moving around on the perimeter, setting up sniper nests—for a healthy ten minutes and—nothing. No movement.

It’s an ugly squat building, huddled in the middle of a sprawling oil-stained tarmac lot. All concrete, tags scrawled up the walls in black and red paint, big roller doors.

Steve taps his comms piece. “Anything on thermal? Any movement?”

Heartbeat pause, and then: “ _Negative, Cap,_ ” comes the reply.

Steve rolls his shoulders, hefts his shield. “Let’s move in.”

Nobody’s home. Nobody’s been home for a while—darkened, reek of mould and water damage, old engine grease and tyre smoke. Broken glass underfoot, scraping under STRIKE uniform combat boots. There are a couple old work desks and a chair in one corner, plywood distorted into rippling shapes by the damp. Concrete pit in the floor, old mechanical apparatus up the side of the pit and arched half across it—musta been the hoist.

“Is this a bust?” Coulson asks, asks the team, the world in general, looking around the greasy grey space, hands tucked into the pockets of his suit pants, brow lined in thought and—

“Sir,” comes from the corner, the whiz kid with his computer array set up on the floor over next to the desks. He’s tapping at his gear, leaning in close to the screen, glasses whited over with reflected light. “Think I’ve got something.”

The hoist isn’t a hoist. Panel on the side of the mechanism opens and there’s a switch inside, disguised to look like part of the works, grey and black with old grease. Twist the switch like so and—

The hoist mechanism grinds, low and mechanical, and then it parts ways like a lover’s thighs, half of the apparatus sliding to either side and exposing a ramp, maybe four feet across, opening up the side of the drop pit and burrowing through concrete into the black.

“Why is it always underground?” Coulson asks, flat and weary like the dramatic lead in a horror flick who’s all-too self aware, and nobody’s got any kinda answer for him, and then—

At the bottom of the ramp there’s a door, chunky and metal, biometric scanner blinking green like a sleepy eye to the right side.

Steve pries open the panel next door with his shield, the kid with the laptop—Abed, his name is Abed—hooks a couple wires into the works, and seven minutes later he’s got the door beeping obediently, metal clunk of magnets letting go.

The door swings open, smooth and silent on its hydraulic hinges, and Coulson waves a hand, signals the advance—

There’s—buzzing whine. Loud, constant, _shrilling_ like wasps humming offa the concrete of the corridor beyond, and—and this is a really solid door, like you could deflect an anti-aircraft round from a tank with this door—

“Hold,” Steve barks, arm out to block access into the corridor—catches one of the STRIKE fellas across the chest.

Regular discolourations in the concrete all along the corridor walls. Round pockmarks, maybe a little bigger than a fella’s fist. Like someone’s dug holes in the concrete and filled ‘em in again. And that whine, steady and clear and malicious, and the faintest stink of—hot metal. Wiring.

It’s subtle. Human eyes wouldn’t have spotted the different colour and textures in the concrete, human ears wouldn’t hear the whine of electrons howling through wires, cutting through the walls like veins, capillaries—

“Cap?” Coulson asks—they’re all statue-still, poised, waiting on him like blooded greyhounds waiting for the rabbit to move.

“The walls are mined,” Steve answers.

“Cluster mines,” Abed announces ten minutes later, studying his computer screen. They’ve pulled back to the top of the ramp and Abed sent a little hover drone down to run scans, work out what the Hell they’re walking into.

“They’re, uh… I’m seeing heat sensor arrays. They’d be wired to blow when a human heat signature passes by ‘em.”

Coulson leans in, staring, taps at something onscreen to turn the image around. “Twenty bombs,” he says, low, musing. “Whole length of the corridor is mined. They’ll be set on a delay—enough time to get the whole squad into the kill box, maybe ten or fifteen seconds. And then the entire corridor goes up.”

The hairs on the back of Steve’s neck stand up. That’s—twenty cluster bombs, spraying shards of steel and concrete into a tight closed space, into soft human tissue and meat and bone. Fucking _Jesus Christ_ and Holy Mary, Mother of God, it’s a good thing Phil Coulson is one of the good guys.

“Okay, so we need a human heat signature,” Steve says, and just pass over the Oscar for Best Actress because his voice comes out calm, neutral, level as an ironing board. “Or something like it.”

And seven minutes after that they’ve stripped every heat pack outta the quinjet’s emergency kit, cracked ‘em to spill chemical warmth and strapped ‘em together in a bundle with a length of tactical webbing.

It’s a Goddamn ugly solution, but it’s the best one Steve’s got right now.

There’s no way they can just disarm the bombs, or rewire ‘em, or shut down the heat sensors, or—any number of more elegant solutions that still leave a metric fuckton of unexploded ordnance behind ‘em. In the walls of their only route in or out of a Goddamn Hydra base. Of contested territory.

So. Time for a big dumb explosion.

“Thirty-eight centigrade, sir,” Abed says, looking up from the medical kit’s thermometer that he’s got stuck into the bundle, like he’s checking the temperature of a Goddamn turkey outta the oven.

Steve gives the kid a nod, looks up to meet Coulson’s gaze. Coulson is—he’s a little pale but he’s calm, his single hand resting steady on the holstered gun at his side. His wounded arm is loose at his side, and Steve can see the connection points, leather straps and socket where the prosthetic fits on, through the flimsier fabric of his dress shirt.

It’s the first time he’s seen Coulson out of a full jacket and tie since he came back after New York.

Christ, this is the first time Coulson has been in the field since New York, the quinjet crash—which is—interesting timing. He’s the best, so it makes sense they’d pull him out of quasi-retirement for this shit fight, but—but—it’s interesting timing.

Good chance Fury’s got him here to watch Steve. Which is—Jesus. Exactly what Steve would do, in Fury’s boots.

Coulson meets Steve’s gaze, nods.

Steve calls it. “STRIKE—moving out.”

They tote the dumb fuckin’ bundle to the bottom of the ramp while STRIKE clear the building, way back outta the blast radius, form up and hold.

And then Coulson lobs the heat pack bundle into the mined corridor, and Steve throws himself against the door, bruising hard, heaves the weight of it closed _fast now immediately now._ Drops to his knees, shield up, grabbing Coulson by the collar and hauling him down and in behind and—

“—three, four, five, six, seven,” Coulson is breathing, low and steady, counting out the seconds, and—

He hits _nine_ and the bombs go off.

It’s a wall of sound—thunderclap of metal and concrete bursting, the roar of flame and then gasping silence, the flame extinguished, all the oxygen gone in the closed space, and the tinkle and thud of shrapnel falling, chunks of concrete hitting the ground.

And then—stillness. Silence. Steve lowers his shield and uncoils, stands. The door held, solid, intact. Coulson pushes himself back up to his feet, brushes some imagined crease outta the fabric of his right shirt sleeve.

“If there’s someone in there,” Coulson says, “I think maybe they know we’re coming.”

“You think?” Steve answers, and then taps his comms, orders STRIKE forwards again, and—

Through the kill box, grit of concrete dust and metal shrapnel under their boots. At the far end of the corridor there’s another blast door, ugly and solid and unyielding as the side of a tank. Abed goes to work with his computer again, leaning against the wall with his legs crossed and the laptop cradled in one arm like he’s waiting for his bus to come, pecking away at the keyboard until—

The door swings open, and a couple dozen bullets come flyin’ out after it.

It’s— _sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys_ —Steve is shield up and head down and running, front and centre and drawing fire because that’s what he’s for, what this shape is for, this body.

There’s the furious _ping_ of bullets shelling off the shield, sharp spike of white pain in his right calf—armoured fibres of his suit take most of the bite out of it and then—forward, forward, into the hail of bullets.

Keep moving—howl of pain from his left thigh, another bullet—keep moving.

They take out the legs, you go down, and that’s when the wolves get your throat. Keep running— _Bedlam boys are bonny, and_ —

—and he’s through the door and into the space beyond, into—he catches half-second slices of detail, like a chopped up film reel: concrete and big computer screens up in one corner, some kinda machine apparatus in the corner.

It’s a boxy room, grey and bleak and maybe a little smaller’n Steve’s apartment, and—and the enemy, a half dozen squid assholes tucked half in behind some metal equipment, rifles up and firing.

Steve hefts the shield and lines up and _throws_ , heaves himself forward and down into a roll—grind of bone and muscle over the concrete and—and over the massive battering percussion of gunfire he can hear a meaty crunch and then a yelp, one-two targets and up, he’s up, lifting his hand—right hand, right glove—

—and _pulling_ , _come-here_ , and the shield slams into his palm in time to turn, catch three bullets—chime of the vibranium singing with the impacts and—

And more gunfire, STRIKE spilling into the room after him, and the squids go down bloody, three-four-five-six and—

Hot metal click of bullet casings on the floor, reek of blood and piss in the air, and they’re all down, torn meat and ugly-motionless, silent—and there’s that guy.

One of the fellas Steve caught with his shield, down but still moving, squirming, rasping heave of his breath as he—he’s groping around at his belt, at—

_Fuck_. “Stop,” Steve snarls, heaves himself forward, and the guy pulls the handgun from the holster at his back and fits the mouth of it snug under his own chin.

“ _Heil Hyd—_ ” he’s spitting, grey-green eyes in pale features, watching Steve’s face like this is the best Goddamn prank he’s ever pulled, furious and fucking ecstatic and—

—and then the blunt clap of gunfire and the top of his fucking head opens red and wet like a flower.

Jesus fucking—“Christ,” Steve barks, half-turning so he doesn’t catch the mist of cooked blood and brain in his Goddamn face. Fucking Christ Almighty, fucking _Hydra—_

“Oh, shit,” one of the STRIKE fellas blurts, and someone else makes a dumb animal noise of—shock, disgust—and then—silence.

Slow wet sound of blood pooling on concrete. It’s running, flowing—there’s a slight slope to the floor, angled down to—to a drain, set round and neat in the middle of the room.

Steve stares at the drain, like it’s an eye, black and hollow and staring back and—a drain. Why in the Christ did they—and he’s remembering Hydra labs dotted across Europe, Goddamn medieval torture chambers in a flimsy-ass disguise, drains set in the floors to catch the body fluids, how the spaces always reeked of cooking meat or chemicals or blood and piss or rot or—

Steve snaps his gaze up, away, looks around. Metal, concrete, bank of computers, and—and there’s a big ugly metal tube, maybe eight feet tall and three feet across, thick ropy cables and wires in and out, a tiny glass panel in the door at eye height. In the other corner, the metal apparatus—it’s like a dentist’s chair, if your dentist was some kinda sexual sadist. There are metal cuffs built into the arm rests, into—huh.

The cuffs are just on the right arm rest. Nothing on the left arm side.

The room smells—past the stink of blood and brains and cordite—there’s old scents soaked into the walls. Leather, and burnt hair, and fear-sweat, and—

“What the Hell is this place?” Steve asks.

*******

Hell. It’s Hell, or near enough to it.

It’s Abed that finds the file while he’s sifting through what’s left of Hydra’s computer system—they musta purged their drives when they realised they were being breached. Standard operating procedure, with Hydra—Steve remembers a dozen times in the War, catching some squid asshole feverishly shovelling paperwork into a furnace, or taking out whole filing cabinets with a fuckin’ laser rifle. So Abed hooked his laptop into their system, made with the electronic sweet talk to get inside but—it’s all corrupted, nonsense files and remnant stumps that go nowhere, mean nothing, except for—

“Hey, here’s something. Sir?” Abed calls, and when Steve and Coulson both fall in he cues up the video file and hits play.

And— _screaming_ , animal screaming spilling tinny from the laptop speakers, raw and anguished.

It’s—it’s Bucky—can’t see his face but that metal arm is unmistakable, shock of dark hair stringy-wet. Cuffed in that fucking chair. There’s a halo of metal plates clamped around his skull, and he’s screaming, writhing—

—half second pause to heave in a breath and then scream again, throat-tearing and mindless and—

Coulson reaches across, catches the lid of the laptop, and slams it closed. The silence is thick and awful as water-logged flesh sloughing off a drowned corpse.

“What the fuck was that?” Abed asks, his voice coming thready, and—

“Cap?” Coulson asks, and—Christ only knows what Steve’s face is doing right now, and he can’t—he _can’t_ —

They—Hydra _did this_ to Bucky.

Hydra fucking _unmade_ him, with their fucking machines and enough electricity to turn an unenhanced human to cooked meat, again and again until it scarred the tissue of his brain. Until he’d kill on command like a dog, until he was stripped down to reflexes and—

Steve’s gonna kill somebody. He’s gonna fucking kill somebody.

“Cap,” Coulson says again, sharper.

Steve looks up, away from the closed laptop, meets Coulson’s gaze for a half second and then turns, walks outta the room, back into the corridor, the kill box. He’s pulling in, pulling tight, roping down—everything. His everything.

He can’t—can’t kill anyone here, can’t destroy that fucking evil piece of—the _chair_ , the fuckin’—it’s evidence, he can’t—

Evidence. This is—

Steve pivots, turns back to—and Coulson is right there, followed him out. Steve points back inside—at the chair, the laptop, the whole Goddamn clusterfuck. He’s diamond bright, narrowed down to a razor edge. “This is proof. They were torturing him. I want Barnes _out of that box_.”

Coulson is watching Steve, studying, his face fixed in that beige wallpaper kind of neutral. He’s silent for a long moment—takes a long breath, slow and controlled, and then—“It’s compelling. We’ll need our analysts to look at it before a decision is made—”

Steve makes a wolf noise, impatient huffing snarl, and—“It could be doctored, Cap. _Steve_ ,” Coulson says, and Steve clenches a fist until his knuckles pop, lets go again.

He’s not wrong— _damn it_ , he’s not wrong.

Steve takes a deep breath, and—and catches the stink of blood, of concrete dust, the old stink of burnt hair again. Christ, he knows where that smell comes from now—that _fucking chair_ , that—Steve fixes his gaze on the pockmarked wall. Nods, robotic, biting down hard on the insides of his cheeks to keep his face under control.

“I’ll be up topside,” he says, rasps out like the meat of his throat is bleeding, and then he turns—grit of chunks of concrete and metal under his boot—and marches. Needs to not be here anymore, not be anywhere near this waking Goddamn nightmare of—

“I hope you’re wrong,” Coulson calls, and Steve stops, half-turns, waits.

“I hope that’s not Bucky Barnes,” Coulson says. “I hope to God you’re wrong. Because if you’re right—if you’re _right_ , and that is Sergeant James Barnes sitting in a cell under Ivy City? Then—we do the math, count from 1945—what we just saw in there. That’s been his life for seventy years.”

Steve—keeps breathing. Slow, controlled, steady. He’s hearing Coulson talking like it’s coming through a wall from the next apartment over, like he’s aware of it but it’s none of his business. Hearing words, but not holding onto any kinda meaning, and—he can’t. He just—he can’t.

Steve nods again, jerky, like there’s a novice puppeteer on the strings today, and then turns and keeps walking.

*******

Midnight finds him—

There’s moonlight filtering in through the lace of the curtains, shifting as the fabric moves—light breeze in through the window, open where he’s climbed in, veiled, like a cat burglar. Steve’s on his knees on the soft pile carpet, slumped against the side of Peggy’s bed with one of her fine-boned hands caught between his, like a child at prayer.

Her spare hand is combing into his hair, petting, slow and shaky. Smells of Ivory soap and talcum powder, very faintly of Chanel No. 5.

It’s selfish—it’s so fucking selfish, pulling her from sleep, burdening her with this—but it’s _Bucky_ , is the thing.

She’d loved him too.

“I left him to that, Peg,” Steve is saying, exhales down at the blankets, his forehead pressed to their clasped hands. “I left him for dead, and what he got was worse’n death.”

“You couldn’t have known, dearest,” Peggy says. “No one could have known. It was war, and you did what you had to do. We all did.”

“I damn well shoulda—” Steve stops, bites down on the inside of his mouth, breathes, starts again. “If he survived long enough to get captured. Survived the fall. Then he had to have been more than human before the train job. So either he was Goddamn born weird, like me, or—or they did something to him at Kreischberg. And I didn’t Goddamn see it right in front of my face.”

Peggy sighs, gives his hair a tug. “Come down from the crucifix, Steven,” she says, and Steve chokes on his spit and then buries his face against the bedcovers and shakes, some strangled silent mongrel mix of laughing and sobbing. Peggy is saying, “I will have to keep telling you, until it sinks in. You are not omnipotent, dear one. You did what you could. You did _all_ you could. And you found him now, didn’t you? You’ve brought him home.”

Steve bites his lip, keeps his head down. If there’s a couple damp spots forming where his eyelids are pressed to the clean white linen, Peggy wouldn’t dream of saying anything about it. She goes back to finger-combing his hair, cold dry fingertips weaving across his scalp slow and easy.

It’s quiet—muted click of Peggy’s bedside clock, marking the hour. Soft rumble of voices through the wall—Steve’s done his reading, knows that a lotta dementia patients perk up overnight.

Silence from Peggy—and her song is still just as it was back in the War, when Steve first met her. Piano, soft and flowing, and the staccato hum and patter of Morse over a radio, and the whisper of tree branches, leaves dancing and moving in the wind.

It’s slowed down with the years, and there are—there are gaps. Like the tune fades, muffled and blurred, a radio transmission slowly moving further and further out of range, before it picks up again.

If Steve—if he’d been in his real body today, in that Hydra base. Would he have been able to hear pieces of Bucky’s song, seeping up like floodwater from the drain in the floor, or oozing outta the leather of that Goddamn chair, jagged shards of him torn away over the years to—

“My love,” Peggy says fondly, breaks the silence, and then: “Michael. When did your plane get in?”

Steve—his eyes snap open and—and then he closes ‘em again, breathes out slow and controlled. This is not the first time she’s decided—her brain skips sometimes, a record jostling on the turntable so the needle lifts, comes back down in the wrong spot.

She’s mistaken him for Michael before. He’s seen the family photos, the pictures of Peggy’s eldest son when he was in his early twenties: wiry build, dark blond hair slowly shading to brown as he aged.

The room’s dark, and her eye sight is fading fast—so he gets it.

Rolls his face to blot the last of the tears onto the bedding and—and he’s pulling in, pulling everything in, breathing steady and focused into the centre of his chest. Winding it all in and down—the spine-deep ache of anguish in his chest like someone’s kicked his sternum in, and under that—under that, the blinding Goddamn _fury_ , burning cold as steel in the guts of a Brooklyn winter. Shoving ‘em in and down like he’s gotta fit a hundred pounds of horseshit into a fifty pound sack.

He can’t—she needs—Peggy. She needs him to hold it together right now.

Steve lifts his head, tilts his face so his features catch the pale smear of moonlight. “It’s Steve, Peggy. It’s me,” Steve says.

There’s a couple seconds of silence—Steve can see Peg turning it over in her head, sorting through the faded scraps of memory, trying to—and then her face clears, silver-bright slivers of dawn cutting through the fog.

“Steve—it’s— _dearest_ ,” she says, breathless with joy and grief, like she is every time this happens, every time she forgets and it’s her first time seeing him all over again, and something cracks inside Steve’s chest, spills scalding hot down into his belly. He squeezes her hand, pastes on his very best smile for her—the one that goes all the way up to the eyes.

Like he’s not caving in. Like he’s not bleeding out.

“You’re alive. You came back,” Peggy says, wavering and thin as an unfed ghost, and she’s crying, tears forming in the corners of her eyes, in the glass-pale curves of her eyelashes.

Steve presses a kiss to the back of her hand. “Always, Peggy,” he tells her, and it’s a vow, a _geas_ , binding like it’s written in blood. “M’like a bad penny.”

“How?” she asks. “How did you survive?”

“There’s no rest for the wicked, I guess,” Steve answers, smiling crookedly and closing his eyes for a moment. He can give her this: uncomplicated happiness, if only for a few minutes, before the fog rolls back in.

Peggy laughs, short and breathy and wet with tears. “You and I know that better than most,” she agrees, and just for right now Steve breathes, and presses her bird-fine hand to his cheek, and holds onto his easy mask for her. It costs him nothing to fake a smile. He can give her this.

*******

Oh eight hundred on Thursday morning and Steve’s getting into the lift at the SHIELD black site. It’s been—God, he last saw Buck on Tuesday evening, dosed fulla super soldier-grade sedatives and twitching on the floor of his cell, right after he’d—

After he’d kicked the Christ outta Steve.

But Bucky had—he’d got clear again, at the end there. Looked Steve in the face like he was starting to remember, so maybe—maybe.

Swipes his ID at the hidden card reader, mushes the B3 button and—and the lift goes up. Wrong Goddamn way—

Steve looks up, finds the dome of the camera in the corner of the roof. Eyes on him, ears. He’s being herded.

Ground floor, doors slide open and—it’s good neighbour Kate. Agent 13, stepping into the lift and turning to face him, crisp as a new dollar bill in a dove-grey government-issue kinda suit.

“Captain Rogers,” she says, nodding, falling into something like parade rest. “Director Fury needs you upstairs.”

Steve strangles the dumb urge to snarl, because—because _Bucky_ , because it’s been thirty-eight fucking hours and Steve’s gonna lose what’s left of his Goddamn mind if he doesn’t get eyes on—“I’m here to see the prisoner,” Steve says.

“I know, Captain,” she says, head cocked. “This is urgent. We’ve received new intel on Hydra this morning, and it could change everything.”

Steve stops, straightens up, looks her in the eye—“What do we know?”

“I don’t have the whole story,” she says, and she’s not quite making eye contact but—“Director Fury can brief you in full,” and she’s reaching over to the control panel, hitting a button.

Jesus—fine. He’ll jump through whatever hoops he’s gotta, and then—Sub-Basement Three, and Buck. The Winter Soldier.

Hope to Christ he’s doing okay, that he’s— _fuck_. Steve cracks his knuckles to keep his hands occupied, mirrors Agent 13’s loose parade rest. The lift carries them up.

Up and up—sixth floor.

Out and down the hall into one of the large conference rooms on the west side of the building. There’s a trio of bulk-bargain office tables laid out in a U-shape, Director Fury standing over by the far wall in the square of white light from a media projector.

Coulson is sitting at one of the tables, and—and Steve recognises Agent Melinda May at the other table, paging through a briefing document.

“Director,” Steve says, standing square in the middle of the room. Agent 13 comes around, takes the seat next to Coulson, hitching her skirt to sit under her knees as she parks herself down.

“Captain,” Fury says. “Have a seat—we’re waiting on Stark.”

Sounds about right—Tony Stark has never been on time for a meeting in his natural Goddamn life, except—

“He’s not—is he coming here?” Steve asks, pulling a chair and sitting in the middle of the U-shape, and Fury nods, regal. “I thought he was still on bedrest and isolation after his surgery.”

“What we’ve learned is worth getting out of bed for,” Fury says.

Steve nods, settles, and—and the room falls silent.

It’s… there’s a blood-bright edge on the quiet, like… No one in the room is speaking. Not breathing right, or shifting like—they’re rigid, poised, and—

And there’s the wood on metal thud of the door opening behind them, and Tony’s voice: “Sorry. I’m late. It’s ‘cause I didn’t wanna be here.”

Steve turns in his seat, watches Tony come in: he’s a sickly kind of pale, green-grey notes under the paste-pale of his skin, dark circles under his eyes. Thinner than he was when Steve saw him last, like he’s lost muscle mass. Moving stiff, careful, like he’s still in pain. Suit jacket over a Guns and Roses T-shirt, leather briefcase in one hand.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Tony says, waving like he’s giving them permission to continue.

“Jesus—sit down, Tony, you look like Hell,” Steve says, half getting up and grabbing a chair.

“I’ll stand. I’m leaving as soon as I can get away with it,” Tony answers, swift and brittle, drops into a lean against the wall by the door.

Tony is—he’s prickly as an alley cat at the best of times, but he usually—usually there’s a handshake, some kinda joke or fuckin’ reference or—but today he’s not even meeting Steve’s gaze. Arms crossed and staring toward the front of the room like he’s staring down a firing squad.

“If I can start,” Fury says, flat as a frying pan, and Steve reorients, faces front, focuses up.

Fury hits a button on the laptop in front of him and the projector lights up: it’s Steve’s ugly mug, grey under the eyes, charcoal-black of his Ghost hoodie stretched tight over his shoulders. “ _I rounded the corner on foot, heading north onto 12th Street, and the Soldier was there. He attacked immediately._ ”

It’s Steve’s debrief, his fairytale of lies and bullshit, from right after the FBI job. After he brought Bucky in.

Steve rocks his weight back in the seat, looks at Fury, raises his eyebrows, a silent question.

“Re-establishing what we already know,” Fury says. “You’ll like the punchline.”

He lets the debriefing play for a couple minutes, and onscreen Steve spins out the lies about fighting the Soldier, about knocking him out with a chokehold and the mask coming off and—

Fury stops the recording. “Not many people in SHIELD know this, but after the Battle of New York, and our spectacular failure to contain the Asgardian Loki and his ally, I had a long look at how they were able to use…” He waves a hand, searches for a heartbeat for the right word. “Extra-human abilities to work around our security measures. Stark?”

“Right,” Tony says, and—

—and what is this. What the Christ is this, this is—the threat is Hydra, they’ve been digging up _Hydra_ , not—why bring up Loki, why _now_ , unless—

“Fury gave me the busted security cams from the helicarrier and the Times Square HQ. After, you know, all the fires were put out,” Tony’s saying. “Asked me to invent a magic-proof security system. Which is a tall order, but then I’m Tony Stark, so—”

_Magic-proof_ —shit. Oh, shit, oh—Holy Mary—

Mother of God. Holy fucking Christ, it’s happening. This is happening. Steve is frozen, still as a dead man buried in sixty feet of permafrost, breath caught in his lungs, staring, waiting.

Stark lifts an arm, taps at his wrist watch: a holographic schematic pops up, hovers in the air in front of his face. “Anyway—I did it. Genius design, of course—two complete circuits, wired parallel but separate. The second circuit is entirely self-contained, lead-lined, draws no power from the grid… Point is, I did it. And then Stark Industries sold ‘em—to SHIELD, and a couple other alphabet agencies. Including the FBI.”

Tony flicks at his watch again, and the schematics wink out. He’s—he’s watching Steve, flat-eyed as a shark. They all are. And they’ve set up the room neat as a surgeon laying out his tools.

He’s surrounded. Bodies all around him, Stark holding the door.

No one is moving but they’re watching Steve, still and waiting and—and Fury hits a button on the laptop again and—

Camera feed—it’s spit-through with static but clear enough. Hexed, lightly singed, but still chugging away.

It’s the FBI server room, from somewhere up overhead. The Soldier is to the left of the frame, standing square and still, his right hand poised over the SIG-Sauer holstered at his thigh and—

And Steve’s seeming walks into the frame, stage right: the seeming of himself, in his little body. Babydoll fairy Steve in his sage green dress with the lace collar and kitten-heeled pumps.

The picture’s not great but it’s—it’s his _face_ , they can all see—oh Jesus, God. Oh _fuck_.

Fury hits pause, puts a fingertip to the projector screen, dead centre of Steve’s torso. Turns to Steve and looks him in the eye and asks: “So, Captain Rogers. Who’s this?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hahaahahahaHaHAHA~


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay fam--here we go. Hang from the cliff no longer :D
> 
> Content warning for some moderately horrible body horror and gore. Steve's no-good, very bad day, part two.
> 
> xoxo

Here’s how it plays out:

Fury hits a button on the laptop, starts the file playing and—and it’s the footage from the FBI server room. Steve can see the Soldier, can see the upright monoliths of the servers in the background. Which means this is gonna look bad; this is gonna look real fuckin’ bad, so—

Steve breathes out. Breathes in.

Goes _inside_ , turns his attention within—he’s sitting up straight as an arrow, facing front like a good toy soldier, but his awareness is dropping like a rock through still waters, down and—

His dog tags are resting against the skin of his sternum, static-warm with the anchored shapeshifting spell. His dermal piercings—second one from the top has an illusion anchored inside: himself, Cap-shaped and generically dressed.

Both anchors at once—pull and _through_ and out and—

And he’s in his real body, music and fire surging into his meat and bones, and he’s swaddled inside an illusion like nothing’s changed—Captain Steve Rogers, sitting attentively in a chair, white T-shirt and jeans and hair neatly combed.

Under the seeming, Steve shoves a hand up and under his shirt and taps on the piercing at the very base of his sternum. The quick deploy walking-veil drops over him.

“So, Captain Rogers. Who’s this?” Fury asks, fingertip pressed to the projector screen, smack dab in the centre of fairy Steve’s skinny chest. He’s paused the footage—Steve’s face is clearly visible onscreen. Maximum dramatic timing.

Steve can see it now, how Fury’s standing—the subtle bulge of a holstered handgun under his jacket.

This is an ambush, and Steve was stupid enough to just walk into the trap and put his head down on the executioner’s block. Jesus Christ on a bike—

There is silence, deep and drenching and breathless. Agent 13’s hand is under her jacket, on her own concealed weapon. Lead-weight thump behind and—and Tony’s hit a button to open his briefcase. Gleam of red and gold armour, folded away like a Swiss Army knife inside. They’re not taking any chances.

“Listen, don’t do anything stupid,” Tony rasps, and Steve—

Grabs the placidly-sitting Cap seeming and anchors it to the bolt in the back of the chair. Kicks free of his too-big shoes and lithely coils up, stands half-crouched in his socked feet on the chair, vaults up onto the desk and leaves the seeming sitting there, smooth as silk on a shoe shine—

—only his seeming must _wobble_ or _flicker_ or something—like when you’re at the talkies and the guy in the projection office doesn’t quite have the switch from one projector to the other cued up right, and the image onscreen hiccups and blips and—

And Agent 13’s on her feet and kicking the chair out of the way as she steps back, and Fury’s pulling out a handgun and barking, “Whoever the Hell you are, _stand down now._ ”

Tony’s armour is surging out of the suitcase and clamping into place around his chest, limbs. Every other soul in the room is pointing a weapon at the Cap seeming, and Steve is—walking veiled up the desk and jumping down at the end, standing half-crouched, pulling threads of the fire of unmaking together in his head and weaving ‘em fast. Any second now someone is gonna—

Agent May pokes the muzzle of her gun through the seeming’s cheekbone and it splinters apart, shards of gold and blue light dropping like shrapnel.

“ _Decoy_ ,” May snaps, and then Steve pulls the hex up and through and his body and—lights, laptop, projector all spitting sparks and—electric-cough- _bang_ of circuits shorting and the computer is on fire, purple flames licking up and pooling over the cheap veneer of the tabletop.

Darkness falls, immediate: there’s light spilling in around the window blinds, light from the flaming PC, but it’s gloaming dark. Just enough to cause confusion. Just enough to rattle ‘em.

Stop and breathe and—Tony. He’s gotta take Tony off the playing field before—

“Stark, thermal imaging,” Fury barks, and Steve furiously hauls power up from the well in his belly, shaping the spell with clumsy shoves of his hand as he prowls forward, voice wavering though the melody of the illusion, of—

He’d hoped to Christ he’d never need to do this. Hoped he’d never be on the other side of the game board from Tony Stark but—

Keep gambling long enough and you’ll roll snake eyes one day.

And Steve’s gliding across the room, dropping low to swing under Coulson’s gun arm as he slowly pivots in place. Coming back up and two more steps and he’s square in front of the armour, in front of Tony, who—recoils, hisses.

“ _Shit.”_

God, his thermal imaging musta come online just as Steve got to him, appeared outta thin blue nothing like some kinda freak show right in front of him. And he’s got no time to respond before Steve lifts his spare hand, presses two fingertips to the armoured face plate, and _shoves_ the spell in through metal and circuitry.

Here’s the thing: if Steve wasn’t fucking attached to one Anthony Edward Stark, it would be real easy to take Iron Man out of play. The suit is a complex electrical mechanism. Steve’s got a handful of strengths, and one of ‘em is hexing the Hell out of complex electrical mechanisms.

But Tony—after New York, after it became real clear that outer space is both occupied and unfriendly, one of the upgrades Tony made to his suit was making it possible to seal the armour up airtight. In case he’s gotta fight in the vacuum of space, or on some alien Goddamn world.

Anyone else mighta called him paranoid, but Steve knows all too well the nature of the threat coming from out there in the void, and he fucking approves and—and the risk is, if he hexes the armour, that in some dying misfire of electrical current—

The risk is he turns Tony’s armour into a bulletproof airtight tomb. The risk is that Tony gets to suffocate inside the suit that is his greatest work, that he dies long before anybody finds some kinda laser or jaws of life to cut him free.

So. Hexing is not an option.

What Steve can do is:

Steve drops the illusion into place, feeling it unfold like a trick handkerchief as it slides from his hand and—and Tony freezes, twitches, and—

And touch is a dealbreaker, breaks illusions.

Steve’s veil is unravelling, unspooling down from his hand like a wooden sweater pulling free.

He’s back-pedalling fast, weight low, catching the tattered threads of the veil spell and hauling them together again in his head and—

—and guns levelled in his direction—shit, they can _see him_ , maybe just for half a heartbeat but—

—he’s veiled again, hidden again, and he drops flat to the floor and—

Two sharp retorts—ear-splitting in this closed room—bullets flying overhead. One pings off the Iron Man suit and hits the tiling overhead.

Christ on a bike—t _oo fucking close_. And that was—

They’re shooting for centre mass. They’re shooting to kill.

Jesus H. Christ.

“ _What the Hell?_ ” Tony snaps, comes through the suit speakers, metallic-crisp.

Steve crawls, cat-creeps back up onto his feet, weaves around Agent 13. Moving again to the far side of the room—don’t be where they’re expecting you to be—and Fury asks, “Have you got him on imaging?”

“ _I’ve got nothing,_ ” Tony says, frozen in place, armoured hands nervously out in front. “ _I can’t see a damn thing, he’s—done something to my heads-up display. I’m flying blind. Did someone just_ shoot me _?_ ”

Steve doesn’t know the first Goddamn thing about heads-up displays, but he has studied the inside of Tony’s helmet, learned the landscape, the shape and the scale. All it takes is a paper thin layer of illusion, a screen of black sat just between Tony’s eyes and the interior display screen—

It’s just a seeming. Tony’s eyes, the HUD—they’re both working just fine: only they can’t see each other. It’ll dissolve the second Tony takes his helmet off or opens the visor—touch is always a dealbreaker. But it’ll buy Steve a few minutes, and that’s all he needs.

“Son of a—” Coulson mutters, and Fury straightens to his full height, announces:

“Listen: that’s a cute trick. You’ve got a few cute tricks up your sleeve. But this entire building is locked down. We know what you are. You’re leaving this room in cuffs… or in a bodybag. Up to you.”

“What did you do to the real Captain Rogers?” Coulson barks, and—oh.

Shit, no wonder they’re so Goddamn trigger-happy, they think he’s… what, whacked Steve Rogers, entombed him under the floorboards and taken over his life?

Holy Mary, Mother of God: what a clusterfuck.

He’s burned, he’s burned to a _crisp_ , and—and— _fuck_.

_Bucky_.

He’s been free of Hydra less than a Goddamn week, and he’s locked down in SHIELD’s sub-basement, hurting and brain-damaged and dangerous as a wounded bear, and only Christ knows how Steve’s ever gonna be able to get near him again and—

—and he’s gotta _stop_ , suck in a gasping-tight breath, tug at a couple fistfuls of hair and get his shit together.

He can’t do this right now. He’s trapped in a mid-sized conference room with four combat-specialist-dash-spies and Goddamn _Iron Man_. Right the Hell now is no time to be fallin’ to fucking pieces, and Bucky—

Bucky survived sixty years of Department X and another decade of Hydra, asshole. _Get your shit together_.

Steve lets his breath out with a sob, straightens up and hauls a handful of power up and through and throws out his hand, throws out the hex, and the far window bursts like someone’s just punted a baseball straight through it. Grains of bulletproof glass pepper the floor, walls, tables like hail.

There’s a chorus of yelps and bitten-off expletives, everyone turning and ducking—the oldest of animal instincts wired into the human body, to turn towards the loud noise, point yourself towards the threat. And he heads the other way, back toward the door, swift and cat-foot silent, chewing at his lip and drawing up power againand throwing the illusion together in his mind’s eye: feathers, claws, beak, eyes—

Agent 13 steps in, snatches the tattered blind—flapping in the breeze and half-torn from its mounting up top—rips the blind down and throws it to the side. Steve cramps his hands into the conjuring gestures and _pulls_ and _lifts_ and throws his illusion out— _he pitches, and it’s a fastball, right down Broadway_ —and then they’re all watching ten pounds of white-tailed eagle perched on the windowsill, brown and white streaked tail brushing glass shards from the sill like a broom.

Watching the eagle throw his wings out wide, tips of his flight feathers tapping at the sills eight feet apart, and then fall forward out of the window and catch the air and soar for the sky, for freedom—

“Rhodes,” Fury snaps out, hand to the comms piece in his ear. “Do not let that _bird_ evade capture.”

Steve hears the static-spit of repulsors firing in reply, and—and outside the window the War Machine suit shoots across the sky, silver-grey and as perfectly crafted for murder as a fucking shark and in hot pursuit of Steve’s imaginary bird.

Holy Christ on a cracker. They are _not fucking around_.

“Son of a—” Coulson spits, and then he turns and marches over and _opens the door_ and steps out, through and out into the corridor, hand to his comms piece and saying, “Retrieval Team Two, move out,” and Steve tails him, low and close enough to fix the collar of his suit, weight on the balls of his feet in case he’s gotta dance outta the way.

He’s out: industrial puke-beige of the corridor walls is the most beautiful Goddamn thing he’s seen all day.

Coulson is bearing right so Steve takes a hard left—there’s fire stairs at the end of the wing. He can get to ground level or get to the roof, get _out_ of this rat trap, disappear into the cracks in the world and—

Rounds the corner and walks into a STRIKE team.

They’re ten feet down the hall, guns coming up to level at him him—thermal imaging, they can see him, even veiled, even—Jesus _fuck_ —but they still—

There’s a half-second hesitation.

It’s gotta be jarring: their eyes and ears are telling ‘em the corridor is empty, but the scans are showing a human-shaped blob running around. So they _hesitate_ , just the slightest hair of a fraction.

Steve shoves a hand up his shirt and reefs at his topmost dermal piercing. The spell-song tears through him on a wave of anguish, pain like he’s on the rack, like some giant has grabbed him by the limbs and is _pulling_ in all directions—

—and he’s throwing himself forward as he shifts, stumbles and almost falls and finds his feet and then he’s Cap-shaped and he’s _running_ , running straight at them.

_Still I’lll sing bonny boys, bonny mad_ —

Bark of rifle fire and—and he can hear the hair-fine wail of a bullet cutting through the air past his ear, and then—punches of heat, bone-deep pain biting into his right shoulder, left hip— _fuck fuck Christ_ —

—and then he’s on them, ploughs foot-first into the front rank of guys and he’s swinging, punching and kicking and moving, keep moving forward.

There’s ten of ‘em in a close corridor—seven, now: first three guys he hit are down—and he’s one guy, a moving target, right in the middle of their formation. They can’t shoot at him now, not without risking friendly fire. Which means—

Crackle of a stun baton from behind and he turns—forearm up to block and kicks the guy in the gut, and he goes down like a sack of shit.

Steve snatches up the stun baton and turns again, parries the next guy’s attack and then clips him with the baton in the helmeted face—sharp snap of his neck turning with the blow and he goes down too and—Christ, please don’t be dead, man.

He can’t have a Goddamn fistfight with these people. They’re not the bad guys—he’s gonna fucking kill someone if he keeps this up. He’s gotta—

Next guy steps in, baton raised, and Steve slaps him in the forearm—open palm—and past the yelp of pain he can hear the clean butcher’s shop snap of bone breaking—and then he ducks, steps in and grabs the fella by the shoulder and hip and _lifts_ and heaves 200 pounds of SHIELD agent up onto his shoulders.

Four of ‘em left standing—turn and he’s making some kinda grinding scream, wolf snarl through a human mouth—three of ‘em clustered together and he _heaves_ and _throws—_ poor asshole sails through the air.

Catches ‘em clean and they’re down, bowling pins, yelps and the crackling punctuation of—sounds like ribs, someone’s ribs, and—

Last guy standing. He’s frozen, rifle in his hands, staring—it’s been maybe eight, seconds since Steve rounded the corner, he’s reeling—brings the rifle up and Steve steps in, turning so the rifle is pointed past him, inhumanly fast. Catches the gun by the barrel and snatches it up and smashes the guy in the face with the butt, clean and swift as blinking, and the agent drops, eyes rolled up, nose and mouth a sea of blood.

Steve mashes the lever to eject the clip, throws gun and bullets in opposite directions, looks around: ten guys in the STRIKE team, ten guys on the floor, no one’s pointing a weapon in his direction.

“Sorry, fellas,” Steve says, and then he turns and he’s running, limping—Jesus Christ, his hip. Keep moving, gotta keep moving.

Down the corridor—stairwell door is on the right and—

Heartbeats. There’s—he’s hearing heartbeats, the rasp of human lungs breathing, the creak of leather and Kevlar moving as bodies shift in space.

Another STRIKE team, inside the stairwell itself—sounds like they’re maybe half a level down—

“ _Eyes up, assholes_ ,” and—that’s Rumlow. That’s Brock Rumlow, so that’s STRIKE Team Alpha.

Christ on a crutch, okay—

Stairs are out.

He’s gotta get out, rat in a fucking trap. He’s gonna end up in a glass box right next door to Bucky and they’ll cut chunks off him, poke and pull and tear him apart—

Gotta get out. There’s gotta be a way out.

Turn and—there’s a door, some kinda office space maybe. He tries the door: locked, security steel—fine.

Half and step back and socked foot up and kick, kick hard, following through with the weight of his body—door parts from the jam, _crunch_ of steel and wood shearing, splinters as the lock tears away from the wood of the doorframe and—

It’s an office: desk, PC, filing cabinets. No one home, and—window. He strides over, rips the blinds down outta the way: bulletproof glass. It’s narrow, six feet up off the ground. Six floors up from the ground.

What a pain in the Goddamn ass. This is gonna suck like the vacuum of Goddamn space—okay, fine.

Grabs the closest filing cabinet and rips it away from the wall, hefts it up onto his shoulder and—hard metal corner into the glass, ramming it, putting the twist and heave of his shoulders and arms into it.

The glass crunches, buckles, bows out but holds.

Second hit— _crunch_ —and then the glass shears away from the frame, tinkle of shards on the window frame, on the cheap-shit linoleum floor.

There are chunks of glass still in the frame, and he doesn’t have time to get precious about it.

Can hear STRIKE moving in the stairwell, combat boots on concrete—

Back across the room—kick the door closed and jam the filing cabinet across it, buy himself a couple seconds, slow ‘em down—and then back over to the window. He reaches up, grabs on—ice-cold slicing of pain across his fingers, into the meat of his palms, glass edges biting in. Mother of _Christ_ but that stings—

Grab and heave and _pull_ and he’s up, hanging halfway out the window, blaze of pain through both hands—cut down to sinew, down to bone—

—soft wet _snap_ of a tendon in his right hand giving way— _blaze_ of white-pain and hand going limp and he’s slumped across the window frame, more glass biting into his belly.

Fuck. What a clusterfuck.

Bang of the door behind him, smashing into the filing cabinet. He’s out of time.

Leans in deeper—knives slicing deep into the meat of his abdomen—throwing his weight forward and he’s tipping, spilling—

Falling—

“ _Nnnnn_ —” spilling out around gritted teeth, mindless animal panic, and he gropes for the third piercing down—parachute spell, _go away go away go away_ —slows his fall for half a second like he’s just hit the skin on a bowl of porridge and then—

Hits the ground— _screaming_ pain shoots up from—he’s turned in the air, he’s landed feet first, left foot lifting to protect the Goddamn gunshot wound in his hip so—crunch of bone shearing in his right leg, blazing up from his ankle, and he’s rolling and falling, on the ground, into the dirt.

Bushes. He’s landed in some kinda fucking generic office landscaping, low bushes and wood chip mulch.

“ _Christ_ on a— _fuck_ ,” he grinds out, hands clawed mindless into the mulch, howling white blaze of agony spilling across his brainpan, across everything, rendering thought and soul down to slurry. He’s growling, teeth bared, heaving with the pain.

Christ. Focus, come on.

Next move, Rogers. What’s the next move?

Dog tags on his sternum. He’s crippled, he’s not going anywhere: gotta change his shape. Hand up—his fingers won’t close, wet rush of blood over his palm and—press against his chest, where the dog tags sit under his shirt—

Rush of the spell pouring through—crunch of bones setting and shrinking, howling ache of his flesh shifting too damn fast—third shift in less than three minutes—it hurts, _Mam, it hurts so Goddamn bad_ —mulch in his mouth, he’s down, writhing—

And the music floods in: the humming purr of his own song, song of the bushes and the fucking mulch, concrete song and the ponderous parade-march kinda song he always hears around SHIELD installations, and fire blooms under his skin, aching in his fingertips.

Heaving half-second—breathing in, in, in, the sudden absence of blinding pain like sunrise rolling over an ink-black landscape, and—okay. Shit.

Spit out some wood chips and get it together, head back in the game, come on—

Grabs a handful of the fire from his belly—and it comes when he calls but it burns, aching lines under his skin, too much magic and too fast—and hauls together a walking veil, rolling up onto all fours, getting his feet under him. Hidden, veiled, but—he can hear a song incoming, growing louder: the electric spark-clicking like he hears around Tony’s armour but not quite the same. Slower, heavier on the downbeat.

The War Machine armour—Colonel Rhodes. It’s gotta be, which means—thermal imaging. Fuck _everything_ , okay—so he’s gotta—

Fifth of his dermal piercings has an illusion he’s spent a lotta time crafting, conjuring, loving on: lots of moving parts, huge and sprawling. It’s not gonna work, not gonna fool thermal imaging, not unless he… Not unless he conjures some heat as well.

The fire spell. What if—

Scream of repulsors—Jesus, _out of time_ , come on. He tears fire up and through, up from the well in his pelvis, weaves it quick and furious and—one fire-starter spell, shaped and crafted and _hold_ and—and another.

It’s like… It’s like he’s holding one spell threaded and ready, steady in his mind, in both hands, and then _sprouting an extra pair_ of fucking hands to do it again.

And again.

Five, he needs five heat sources, so he’s gotta— _hold ‘em_ , hold ‘em steady, don’t lose any of the threads— _three_ —and the pressure is building inside his skull, aching to a burn, like he can hear his heartbeat, stuttering, pounding liquid-heavy.

_Four._ Can feel his pulse in his fucking eyeballs.

_Five_ and he grabs onto the dermal piercing and twists at it, pulling the illusion spell out and through, and—and seed the fire-starter spells in, one in each of the branches of the spell. In each of the Steve Rogers seemings.

Five Steves spill out from his chest, turn on their heels, and then put their heads down and _run_ in five different directions.

They’re him in his Cap shape: identical outfits, hair, stride and stature, each of ‘em running hard for a different point of the compass. One runs straight into the side of the building and dissolves into splinters of gold light, but the others—-

Repulsors howl straight overhead, close enough Steve can feel the heat and shift in his hair. Looks up and—yeah, there’s War Machine, hovering neat as a ballerina en pointe right above where Steve landed in the mulch. Where he’s crouching, veiled, now.

“ _There’s, uh—_ ” Rhodes says, coming robotic through the speaker of his suit, and then, thinly: “ _There’s four of him now._ ”

Four illusions. Means he’s missed the real Steve. Thank Christ for that.

Rhodes—bark of the repulsors firing again and he’s off, chasing an illusion, and Steve uncoils, staying low in the bushes but moving, running—

He gets to the street.

Cuts through a couple of industrial lots and crawls under a fence and steals a car—had to leave his bike behind, in the parking lot under SHIELD’s black site. And that—yeah, that stings some, pang of an ache like when he breaks one of the little bones in his hand.

There’s not much in the way of physical possessions he’s let himself get attached to, but he’s pretty sweet on his bike.

Steals a car and throws an illusion over it and _drives_ , cycling to a different illusion every few miles until he’s back in town.

Ditches the car in an outlet mall carpark—no one’s gonna find it there for at least a couple days—and throws an illusion over himself and gets on a bus. Changes bus line every fifteen minutes or so.

It’s noon: there are people everywhere, suits and skirts and briefcases, going about their lives like nothing has changed. Like the whole Goddamn world hasn’t just been flipped upside down and shaken.

He’s—he’s watching the traffic, watching people eating lunch at the coffee shop they’re driving by, watching some lunatic cyclist weave through the traffic like she’s got half a day to live and not a Goddamn second to waste. And if he’s gasping, shaking, shuddering down to his core, ice water surging slick up and from his centre like it’s been under pressure for too long, like steam forcing its way out of an overworked engine—well, if he is, no one can see him. Not his real face.

His illusion is smooth, serene as a swan moving over water.

Christ, he’s—how many times has he gotta lose _everything_? Gotta lose—everyone, everyone he gives a shit about, and—he can’t—

Can’t go back to his apartment; SHIELD will be there—probably moved in two minutes after he left this morning, so smug and sure of the trap they’d laid. His shield is there, and the knife and cloak Ulfadhir gave him. All his clothes, and if they ever had any doubt what kinda pervert they were dealing with—

He can’t go back. He can’t go back and _he had to leave Bucky behind_ and he can’t go back and—

And thank fuck for the illusion because the noise coming outta him isn’t human: it’s low and wounded, wordless, wolfish, somewhere between a moan and a keen, fingernails biting into the flesh of his elbows as he curls up, folds over, howls into his knees on a city bus.

He had to leave Bucky, and he only just _found_ Bucky, has had less than three fucking hours with him after seventy Christ-forsaken years apart, years in which Buck was held captive and tortured and torn apart, and he was—

He was Steve’s everything.

Even when he had _nothing_ , he had Bucky.

He’s blinking tears away, palming at the smears on his face, breathing and centring his shit and sitting up and—“Joliet Street,” the driver calls from the front of the bus. “Last stop, folks: end of the line.”

“To Hell with that,” Steve says.

*******

Union Station, tile cool under his stocking feet and fluorescent lighting crisp and soulless overhead. It’s evening, late evening, last of the work commuters heading home and first of the evening crowd coming through, high heels, jeans under suit jackets, smokey makeup.

He’s moving under yet another illusion, making himself look like some tired anonymous tourist, sunglasses up on his head and sensible walking shoes and an over-the-shoulder bag like maybe he’s carrying maps, papers, camera. He’s been cycling through illusions all day, changing over every time he gets the chance.

Doesn’t think SHIELD are on him, but Christ knows he’s been wrong about that before.

Down the stairs and across the foyer, open space, random people milling around, checking the timetable on their phones and—storage lockers up ahead.

He crosses to the lockers, moves down to—second-to-last one, top row. He’s been quietly paying off a station employee to keep this one locked for him for over a year now. An insurance policy he’d prayed to every Saint he was never gonna need, coming due.

Punches in the four digit code and the door pops open: anonymous grey backpack, little scuff and tear on the straps—he’d picked the bag up secondhand, brand new too clean, bright, memorable. It’s heavy—five grand cash in bundled up bills, a couple ceramic knives and some garrotting cord, some nice forged identity documents in a couple of personas, a couple burner phones, spare socks and undershorts and a change of clothes crammed into the gaps. Behind the bag is a pair of boots—black, army surplus, in his real size.

Bag over his shoulder and he grabs the boots down and grabs the door to close it and— _piano_. He’s hearing—shatteringly high melody, lull of snowy down beats, punctuation of silenced gunshots—

Closes the locker. Natasha Romanoff is standing at the end of the row, watching him, eyes gleaming, leant against the lockers. It’s very casual, arms-crossed—puts her hand right next to the under-arm gun holster that Steve will bet any money she’s wearing.

“Sloppy, Rogers,” she says. “I taught you this trick.”

“In my defence, I’ve had a pretty bad day,” Steve says.

“You know you move the same way? Whatever you look like,” she says, waving a hand at him, his illusion, the borrowed face he’s been walking around in for the last hour and change.

“Can we skip the foreplay and jump ahead to the part where you try to kill me?” Steve asks.

Natasha makes a face, pretty little moue of her mouth. “You’re interrupting my script.”

“Real sorry about that,” Steve says, and under the illusion he cracks the knuckles of his right hand and then folds his fingers into a conjuring gesture, calls up a hair-fine thread of the fire of unmaking and weaves a hex, holds it cocked like a spaghetti Western gunslinger with their hand poised above the revolver, ready to draw—

“The S.R. missions,” Natasha says, and Steve freezes. “I have a new bet on how you mighta pulled them off.”

“I had this real convincing stick-on mustache,” Steve rasps.

“I think you used magic,” Natasha says. “I think you walked in and out of secured complexes in plain sight and no one saw you because you used sorcery.”

Steve breathes out. It comes out shaking, stuttering. His right hand, his hexing hand, is starting to shake, starting to ache in his knuckles, in his bones.

“Are you really Steve Rogers?” Natasha asks.

“Yes,” Steve grits out.

“You know they think you killed the real Captain Rogers and replaced him so you could infiltrate SHIELD.”

“Why in Christ’s name would I do that?” Steve asks, voice coming thready.

“That’s the question on everybody’s lips,” Natasha says, and the pink tip of her tongue comes out to wet the bow of her lower lip—distraction. Jesus, she’s dangerous—“Maybe to feed us false intelligence. Maybe to act as a double agent, as a mole. Could be you’re the start of another alien invasion. Could be you’re Hydra.”

“I am not _fucking Hydra_ ,” Steve snarls, and—stupid. He’s dancing to her tune, she’s saying shit that she knows will get a reaction, reading him like a book.

Fuck it, fuck everything—

“My name is Steven Grant, born July of 1918, and my Mam put _Rogers_ on the birth certificate because she needed some kinda surname on there, and the Goddamn _inhuman entity_ who fathered me didn’t leave his. I think she thought he was some kinda faerie, or an elf,” Steve says, and it’s spilling out, breathless, unstoppable as the rising tide.

“I’m a _sorcerer_. I _always have been_. I used what I can do to fight in the War, and I used what I can do to spy and kill and sabotage, and then my freak biology kept me alive for seventy Goddamn years in the ice, and now I’m here.”

He takes a breath, eyes darting—Natasha’s lips, her eyes, her hands. Christ, don’t lose track of her hands. “And I hid, plain sight, for reasons that should be real obvious. I’ve seen what they’ve done to Banner, others like him. I know about the people SHIELD have locked away in the Fridge. Anyone whose biology they can’t explain or behaviour they can’t control… I’ve hidden my whole Goddamn life.”

And—and breath out, explosive, and he’s shaking, shaking all over, convulsive shudders down his arms and legs, like the strings of a piano quivering long after the struck note has left the air. Everything but his hexing hand, steady as a rock now.

Natasha is looking studiously neutral, eyes steady—frozen in place. She’s processing, giving nothing away. “That’s a Hell of a story,” she says at last.

“Natasha,” Steve rasps, and then, his best schoolgirl Russian: “Natalia _. Ya ne khochu delat' tebe bol'no._ ”

She’s silent, staring, eyes darting, and then she cocks her head to the side and says, “Walk with me.”

“Into the trap?” Steve asks.

“There’s no trap,” she says, looking him dead in the eye so he can read her. “SHIELD doesn’t know I’m here. But we’ve been standing in one spot for too long. It’s like amateur hour in here.”

She turns, starts walking towards the gates, towards the train platforms. Steve takes a breath and—and drops the hex, shakes out the cramp in his conjuring hand. Drops his boots and steps into them, unlaced, and slopes after her.

Natasha has pulled out her phone, is pretending to tool around on it as she walks, slow and meandering. “So. If any of that was true, what’s your play?”

“You’re asking like I’ve got some kinda five-year plan blocked out here,” Steve says. “I’m gonna lay low, lick my wounds. After that…” He rubs at the bones of his right wrist, where the hex put its claws in and bit. “ _Bucky_. Somehow. I’ll get him out, I can’t leave him behind. Not even if… SHIELD might be the best place for him. The only place to get him some help, untangle the mess in his head. But—I can’t leave him behind. I’m not that good a man.”

Natasha is stopped, half-turned, studying him—whatever tells are bleeding through to his illusion, whatever she just heard in his voice—“Huh,” she says, after a couple heartbeats. “They left that out of the history books.”

Christ on a cracker, she’s sharp as a Goddamn tack. And he’s spilling over, all of his careful secrets, the house of cards he’s spent decades building and reinforcing and papering over and—

“Yeah, according to my twenty-first century briefing, _homosexual proclivities_ were invented in the Seventies,” Steve says, flat as an ironing board, meeting her eyes, holding his illusion steady, expressionless.

“So what, you’re gonna… use what you can do to infiltrate, break out your brain-damaged assassin boyfriend—”

“ _Jesus_ ,” Steve mutters.

“—and then disappear off the grid for the rest of your unnatural lives?” Natasha asks. “Throw it all away, throw us all away, your life here and everything you’ve worked for—”

“They’re shooting to kill, Natasha,” Steve snaps. “Do you think I _wanna_ burn it all to the ground? I don’t see a way outta this shit show that doesn’t end in me in a glass box or a wooden one, and either way I’ll never see the Goddamn light of day again. And I won’t go back to the dark, I _can’t_ —can’t do any more time in the dark. So I’ll run. What the Hell else am I supposed to do?”

“Prove your innocence,” Natasha says, turning to look at him, and there’s a note of—determination. Set like stone.

She’s been steering him to this point.

“I am the _farthest thing_ from innocent,” Steve says, laughter punched out garrotting-wire thin.

Natasha makes a noise like a low-pitched growl, eyes rolling up for a half-second like she’s asking the good Lord for patience. “Did you kill Captain Steven Rogers?”

“ _No_ ,” Steve snarls. “Christ’s sake—”

“Did you infiltrate SHIELD to bring it down from the inside, or spy for another organisation, or—”

“No,” Steve says. “I _joined_ SHIELD to protect people, protect the world.”

And he wants to say _from Thanos and his armies_ , from the threat that’s coming from the sky, coming for the whole world. But he can’t, can’t spill that secret: not without revealing its source.

Which was Loki. After Steve broke him out of his cage at SHIELD HQ.

Jesus, what a fucking mess.

“Then _everything else_ is gravy,” Natasha says. “Prove you’re Steve Rogers, prove you’re one of the good guys. Or the less-bad guys, anyway. The sorcery, the hiding, the extra-human backstory—give Fury half a day to get used to the idea and he’ll be putting you back to work.”

Steve stills, takes a breath. Goes within.

“You’ve seen my file,” Natasha says, quieter now—she’s made her peace about where she came from, but she’s never been proud of it. “You know how much red I have in my ledger. They gave me a second chance.”

Steve wets his lips. “Did—did I kill anyone today?”

“No,” Natasha says. “Few broken bones. Lotta bruised egos,” and Steve feels something snarled in a knot just under his ribcage let go, unfurl.

Thank fuck for that.

He lets his breath out, slow, steady. Cracks his knuckles. “It won’t be easy,” he says.

“Sure would be easier if you had someone friendly and trusted helping you from the inside,” Natasha says, real pointed.

“Why would you help me?” Steve asks.

Natasha is silent for a long moment. She’s half-turned, staring at a Metrorail map sprawled across a distant wall. There’s the slightest notch in her brow, the slightest flaw in her porcelain mask of neutrality.

“I’ve seen the footage from the FBI cameras,” she says at last, quiet and very level, and Steve stifles the urge to flinch. “And it’s—incomplete. Patchwork. There’s not enough viable intel there to incriminate or exonerate anyone. So—all of this. The set up, the resources that have gone into bringing you down. It feels like there’s an agenda being pushed, somewhere I can’t see. And I don’t like agendas I don’t understand.”

“Oh,” Steve breathes out.

“You’re cute in green. You know, incidentally.”

She’s turning, half-pivot to look back at him, eyebrow quirked and the razor-edge of a smile pulling at one corner of her mouth. Studying him, looking for a response, and Steve is—he’s giving her nothing, pulled in tight as diamond, locking down every twitch of muscle and tendon.

Christ, she knows. They all know that he’s—that he’s a fuckin’ fruit, that he’s bent. _Ergi_. It’s not enough to be a freak and a monster, he’s also a cocksucker. How—how much does the footage actually show? If it’s—if it’s incomplete, does—does it haul Buck down into the gutter alongside him? Does it—

Natasha completes the turn, boot heel scraping an arc along the tiled floor. Takes a step closer, pitching her voice lower. “If you’re telling the truth. If you’re really S.R. Then SHIELD needs you on the inside, kicking out. Not the outside, kicking in. So, I’ll help you prove to SHIELD you are who you say you are. And if you’re not, if you’re lying…”

She steps closer again. Drops her voice further, a sultry kinda bedroom register. Her eyes have drained cold, cold as frostbite.

“If you’re not Steve Rogers. If you put him in the ground. I’ll know right where you are when it comes time to kill you.”

Steve studies her. She cocks her head to the side, studying him right back, giving him the professional courtesy of letting him see her face, no masks, no personas: she’s hard as marble, sharp as surgical steel. Thank Christ she’s one of the good guys.

“Thank you,” Steve says, and then: “Natasha _, bol’shoye spasibo_.”

“Makes me tingle when you come over all Comrade Stepushka,” Natasha says, and then she slants her gaze up overhead, at the nearest security camera. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Big Brother is cramping my style.”


	9. Chapter 9

Natasha has a safe house—well, apartment. It’s a box, pretty much, a glorified concrete box—in the basement of an apartment complex in Edgewood.

They’re locked down inside by nine o’clock at night, tail end of what’s probably the second worst day of Steve’s fuckin’ life. Cement blocks painted anaemic lemon yellow and a tatty old mattress on the floor, and Natasha’s standing at the kitchen counter, booting up a slick little Stark brand laptop and—

“Shower’s in there,” Natasha says, cocks an eyebrow but doesn’t bother lifting a hand from the keyboard to point—there’s only the one internal door, one way to go. “Go scrub down; you smell like a crime scene.”

And it’s true, is the thing—Steve’s putting up a front, a seeming, looks clean and presentable but underneath—

Underneath he’s still streaked with caked-on blood. His own, mostly, and some from the STRIKE fellas. Reek of gunpowder and old sweat has set deep into his clothes, his hair. And he ain’t cunning enough to conjure an illusion to hide stink.

And once he goes through that door he’s—vulnerable. Won’t be able to see the enemy bearing down on ‘em, another STRIKE team spilling into the stairwell, coming in hot through the triple-bolted door. There’s no way outta there, not once he’s closed up inside, a cell inside another cell with no doors or windows or weapons or options or—

“Rogers,” Natasha says, and Steve snaps to attention, to—Natasha’s put the laptop aside and stepped closer, reaching out and—

—and there’s a lurching half-second where Steve sees the gun in her hand and the inside of his head slips sideways, cold as permafrost, calculations and angles—

—but it’s not levelled at him.

She’s holding the gun by the barrel. Offering it to him.

Steve lets out the breath that’s snarled up in his chest, slow and careful. Reaches out and takes the gun—it’s a Glock 26, one of her personal weapons, which means—careful not to let his fingers brush hers, not to break his illusion.

“Thanks,” he says, stilted. If she’s doing this, then she’s—she’s seeing through him, seeing past his front to—and he’s fucked in the head, but he’s been holding up that front of _okayness_ for so long it’s just about surgically grafted on, bolted to the bone like Bucky’s Goddamn metal arm, but—

She’s giving up one of her own weapons because she can see that right now he needs it. Like a fucked up security blanket. Because he’s fucking crazy as a sack of weasels, and it’s all falling down, all his masks and his fronts and layers of defence. He’s all falling down.

Steve checks the chamber, the magazine, the safety. Nods and turns and marches into the bathroom.

“Steve,” Natasha calls when he gets to the door, and he stops, half-turns back, waits. “When you come back out of there, come out as you, okay? The real you. If this is gonna work, we need… This is gonna sound off-brand, coming from me. We need a measure of truth, okay?”

 _Shit_. Mother Mary, fulla grace, _fuck me_ —Steve nods again, hauls the door closed behind him.

He strips off, drops his illusions, showers. Scrubs with blunt fingernails until the dried blood sheets off—shoulder and chest, down his leg from his hip, over his hands and wrists, a line marching across his stomach where he’d laid over the sill of broken glass. Keeps scrubbing until the water runs clear.

Takes a while. Takes a couple minutes.

When he gets outta the shower he leaves the water running, picks up the gun and stands against the door, listening with—with his _other_ ears, with his head. Listening to the music—

—and he hears mold and concrete, the purr of water lacing through old pipes and the whine of electricity. Hears Natasha’s song, all piano and snow and silenced gunshots layered over a toneless near-silent wail.

Nothing else. No one else.

Steve shuts the water off, hauls a set of clean clothes out of his go bag, gets dressed. Eyes down, on the floor, the bag between his feet, because there’s a mirror on the front of the cabinet above the sink. And then—

“Are you sure?” Steve calls through the bathroom door. “I mean, it ain’t pretty.”

Natasha makes a rude noise, muffled through the plywood. “Is it more shocking than Banner’s party trick?” she asks, blunt as a fist to the face, and clearly she expects the answer to be _no_ , and Steve’s looking up, meeting his own gaze in the mirror, and—

“I don’t know,” Steve says, and he’s telling her and he’s telling himself, his reflection. Pale wolf eyes stare back. He’s thrown his wet hair in a topknot, baring the Jotun scarring on the sides of his neck. Over sized T-shirt sits low, half off a shoulder, leaves the topmost dermal on his chest on display, leaves the feathers and scars on his skinny arms exposed.

He flashes fangs at himself, turns away to address the plywood again. “It’s kinda… I don’t know. Uncanny valley.”

There’s silence for a heartbeat, and then, “Get out here, Rogers,” Natasha says, and Steve blows out a breath and opens the door, walks out.

Natasha is sitting on the threadbare sofa, feet tucked up underneath her ass, a tin mug of something hot—tea, maybe, from the smell—in one hand. She looks up, sees him, and—

Her face shifts, half a second of—it’s there and gone too fast for Steve to read it, and she’s back to neutral, smooth and calm as a mountain lake. She stares, studies, unblinking, and the silence drags for a heartbeat, two, three, and then—

“Nice contacts,” she says, shifting her weight from one heel to the other.

“Yeah, sure would be nice if I could just pop these out, put ‘em back into a case before bed,” Steve says, waving a hand at his eyes and walking over to the mattress on the floor, across the room. Lets himself drop, cross-legged, into a sit.

The apartment is—living area spills into the kitchenette, tiny and tattered and clean. Kitchen is stacked up full of Army surplus MREs—and, apparently, Russian tea. The bathroom cabinet—Steve checked it out while he was in there, delaying the moment of truth—is jammed full of the kinda first aid kit you could use to patch up anything short of major organ failure, scissors and clippers and like six different colours of boxed hair dye.

“So how does that work for you? On a sensory level—do you see like a dog, all black and white, or…” Natasha asks, and—of course she fuckin’ does. Of course she wants to know how his rig works, what this body is capable of—never Goddamn mind what it looks like, what can it _do_.

“I can’t see the blue-purple end of the light spectrum,” Steve says, shifting to lean against the wall behind him. “I see really well in the dark, though, so—I think maybe I can see some of the infra-red range of light that humans don’t? But I don’t know—that’s my unscientific working theory. Ears aren’t great. Sense of smell seems to be about shop-standard. And I can… sense things. Magically.”

Natasha twists her lips into a moue, gives him a dead-eyed stare like she thinks he’s been an even bigger idiot than usual. “You can sense things magically,” she repeats, flat.

“I can’t explain it better’n that, okay?” Steve says, throwing his hands up. “I wish I could, but—it’s part of my sensory array. And it’s not, for normal people. How would you…” and he pauses, thinks back to when Ulfadhir—when Loki—first came to him eighty-plus years ago. First told Steve about sorcery, about the weave and the weft of Creation birthing itself and—

“How would you describe the colours in the Mona Lisa to a blind man?” Steve asks, and he sees that sink in with her, her eyes darting to the side, slow movement as she passes her cup of tea from one hand to the other, processing.

“Okay,” she says, slow, drawling. “But then—but then you’re also Captain America. How does that work?”

“Shapeshifting,” Steve says, and there’s a pressure inside his throat like he’s downed a grape whole, got it wedged halfway. He swallows past it, continues: “It’s a spell. Stack on some height and muscle outta magic and spun sugar. It’s a trick. The whole time—in the War, with the SSR—I just kept it up, kept pretending. I’m a fraud.”

“So, you just conned the United States Government, their armed forces, SHIELD, and the entire canon of modern world history for, what, seventy years?” Natasha asks, eyebrows dancing, leaning back into the sofa cushions.

Steve closes his eyes, takes a breath, weaves a couple conjuring gestures with one hand. “That’s about the shape of it, yeah.”

“Who knew the truth?”

“Bucky,” Steve says immediately. “He, uh, caught me ripping the roof offa reality enough times to figure it out. And Peggy. I told her, showed her, when I volunteered to do the S.R. missions.”

Natasha reaches down, puts her mug on the floor, sits back again, slow. She’s staring through the far wall, turning the pieces over in her head. “Barnes is no good,” she says after a minute. “Even if he remembers anything—which is doubtful—he’s too badly compromised for his testimony to hold up. Carter could work.”

“She’s got Alzheimer’s,” Steve points out.

“So she doesn’t remember her grandkids’ names. She remembers the war,” Natasha says. “And she was the Director of SHIELD for over thirty years. That carries a lot of weight with the people we need to convince.”

“I don’t—” Steve starts, stops. “Do we have to—burden her with this? She’s sick, and it—it upsets her, confuses her, talking about the past.”

“Rogers, she was your friend,” Natasha says, and—

“Still is,” Steve says, immediate and firm as the foundations of the Earth. If Margaret Carter asked Steve to walk into traffic tomorrow, he’d pause maybe all of long enough to ask which intersection he oughta head for.

“Is your friend,” Natasha course-corrects, mid-breath. “And she was your… girlfriend? Your beard? How did that work?”

Steve pulls a face, scrubs with blunt fingertips at his hairline, pulls the hair tie out and reshapes his topknot so he doesn’t have to look her in the eye. After he—after he went into the ice, after he _died_ , the years and decades that followed, there was—interest. In his life, all the—the _man behind the shield_ sorta nonsense.

A lotta people had kinda figured he and Peggy were an item—the red-blooded specimen of American manhood and the British bombshell in victory curls. They figured wrong.

And at some point in that blurring passage of years, decades, Peggy stopped correcting them—she’d never told the lie outright, but when folks made assumptions she’d left ‘em standing, unchallenged, and—

“If they’d looked past me, if they’d kept looking, they could well have spotted James there, always at your side, and…” Peggy trailed off, let go of his hand to press her fingertips to the inner corners of her eyes like she can push the tears back. “And you know what kind of world it was, then. They would—this world would not have been kind to a queer Captain America. Can you believe I wanted to protect you both?”

“I know, Peg,” Steve said, quiet, and—

“I let them neuter all three of us for the sake of the history books, Steve. I’m so sorry,” Peggy said, and then the lines of her face deepened, twisted, and her eyes slammed closed, and Steve hunted around for her handkerchief. Pretended his heart wasn’t hurting like 40,000 volts to the chest, same as it did every time her memory skipped and they had the same damn conversation.

They were never like that, she and him, never. But Steve gets why Peggy let the world think that, why it was the cleanest fix she had to hand for the mess he’d left her to tidy up, and—

“She is my friend,” Steve says to Natasha, quiet and solid. Complete sentence, full stop. What happened after Steve went into the ice is Peggy’s story to tell.

“So she cares about you,” Natasha says. “So she wants you to be safe and—if she were whole in body and mind she’d tell you herself: it’s not too much to ask. A few minutes of grief? The woman kept your confidences for most of seven decades, Steve, in the face of immense pressure—”

“Okay,” Steve says—because Christ, he doesn’t need to be reminded of the debt he owes Peggy. She’d spent most of two decades on a half-dozen Red Scare watchlists for refusing to give up details of the S.R. missions, while Steve was off role-playing as a pack of wolves in Greenland.

“Okay, we can—they can ask her. They just gotta—look after her, take care with her.”

“It’s not like anyone’s gonna pull out fingernails to get her talking,” Natasha says, and for a half-second she folds the pinkie and ring finger of her left hand under, presses ‘em to the arm of the couch, gaze shifting to the far wall like she’s stumbled off the safely marked trail inside her head.

And then she sharpens up, nods, flexes out her hand, sits forward.

“Listen,” Natasha says. “Does SHIELD have your DNA on file?”

*******

Midnight, and Steve’s knocking on an apartment door, standing back so he can be seen through the peephole: he’s Cap-shaped, wrapped in an anchored illusion.

Seeming of blond curls and jeans and a warm woollen jumper, a sheepish kinda look pasted on Dr Leo Fitz’s—SHIELD Engineering, Agent Level Four—on Fitz’s face.

Hearing the rasp of bare feet on carpet, the soft liquid drum of a heartbeat and then the rattle of the security chain coming off and the door opens. Dr Jemma Simmons, SHIELD Biomedical, Agent Level Four, in her Peanuts themed pyjamas, chestnut hair back in a loose plait, like she’s just climbed outta bed. “Fitz? What’s going on?”

She’s stepping back, letting him in, immediate and instinctive—because this is the play: you wanna get to Simmons, Fitz is her weak point, as per Natasha’s briefing, her intel.

Steve follows her in, trying to move like Leo Fitz would—gentle, careful—not like a fucking wolf moving in for the kill. “I need your help, Jemma,” he says in Fitz’s voice, watching as she turns and closes the door, flips the lock back over.

Small apartment, neat. Soft throws on the sofa. Bookshelf full of biology texts, chemistry texts, a handful of biographies. Barstools at the kitchen bench. Light spilling through from the bedroom, from the street outside, window in the far wall.

“What’s wrong?” Simmons asks, stepping in, and Steve thrusts his hand out, the fistful of sterile swabs and medical gear, all of it neatly sealed in paper and plastic, ready to use, and Simmons reaches out to take what he’s offering, automatic, trusting—

Their hands brush. “Please, it’s okay,” Steve says.

His seeming dissolves, unravels like an old scarf, and Steve can see the horror in her face, the mindless fear as her friend falls into shards of gold light and—

“Please don’t scream, please don’t scream,” Steve chants, hands open and out so she can see ‘em, and she’s sucking in a breath, back-pedaling hard, hands flying up to her face.

“I’m not gonna hurt you. Jesus, I’m sorry, I’m not gonna hurt you, it’s okay.”

She’s fetched up against the wall, shaking, handful of forgotten medical supplies clutched against her neck. “You— _what_?” she whisper-screams, rasping, breath coming in shudders.

“I’m—Jemma, Dr Simmons. I’m sorry. I’m not gonna hurt you. This isn’t a hostage thing. I’m not armed. Closest thing I got to a weapon, I just put in your hand,” and she blinks, glances down at—needle and syringe, still in their packaging.

“I’m so sorry. I didn’t wanna scare you but you weren’t gonna open the door to a fugitive from SHIELD.”

“What—” she starts, stops, blinking hard, starting to uncoil, looking at the gear he’s given her—swabs, tourniquet—and back at him, rapid, processing. Then: “Did you—did you hurt him?”

“No,” Steve says, immediate. “No, Fitz—he’s fine. I didn’t even go near him—I just borrowed his face. Like taking a photograph—the original isn’t damaged by making a copy. He’s fine.”

She’s silent, staring, eyes darting over his face, shoulders, hands, back to his face. Studying. “What do you want?” she asks, after a long breathless pause.

“I need your expertise,” Steve says. “I gotta ask you to use those on me. Blood and cheek cell swabs.”

She looks back at the medical supplies. Back up at him. Straightens, spine uncoiling. “And then you’ll go?”

Mother Mary—she’s _brave_. She’s so brave.

“And then I’ll go. Swear to Christ,” Steve says. “You can refuse. You can kick me out now. I won’t hurt you. I’m asking.”

She’s still for a long moment. He can see the gears turning behind her eyes, can see her shaking hands steadying, steadying. She is a SHIELD agent, and as of this morning, he is a fugitive from SHIELD. She won’t turn up the chance to learn something, uncover something. Can see her training surfacing, spine straightening.

Then: “Sit over here,” she says, pointing at the kitchen counter.

Steve does as he’s told, gives her a wide berth so she’s got time to run for it or grab a weapon or—but she’s coming with him, putting the supplies on the counter, screwing the needle onto the syringe.

Steve shoves up his sleeve and sits on one of the barstools.

“So, what are they telling everyone about me?” he asks, holding his arm out, elbow crooked.

“That you’re not really Steve Rogers,” Simmons answers, low, not making eye contact. Snaps gloves on over her hands. “That you’re some kind of rogue magic user, probably an alien, and you’ve… done something with the real Captain Rogers.”

Steve sighs, quirks his mouth, looks up to—can hear a car on the street—and then it goes by, not slowing. Stand down. “Well, they’ve got it half-right.”

Simmons straps the tourniquet on around his bicep and reefs it in tight, scrubs at the crook of his elbow with an alcohol swab. “What’s the truth, then? According to you.”

“I’m a rogue magic user,” Steve says, feeling—giddy, unmoored, like he’s free-climbing someplace impossibly high, the air thin as a whisper—coming out with it: the truth, the real deal at last. “And I’m half human. And I’m also Steve Rogers. These truths aren’t incompatible.”

“How…” Simmons has a needle poised over his vein, paused, eyes rolled up to meet his. “How on Earth did that happen?”

“Well, sometimes an otherworldly sorcerer and and a human woman love each other very much—Christ, the usual way, I imagine,” Steve says. “I hid it. Hid it my whole life. And then the Second World War happened, and the S.R. missions.”

“You used sorcery for the—then Peggy Carter knew?” Simmons asks, and then—white-bright point of pain as she puts the needle in, hands steady, drawing back on the syringe. Blood flows, fills the barrel—Steve can smell the tang of rusted iron.

“Peggy knew,” Steve says. “She and Bucky Barnes were the only ones. I was hidden so far back in the closet I had to get sunlight imported by train.”

“Well then,” Simmons says, grabbing a cotton ball and pulling the needle free, pressing the cotton over the bleed. “That’s certainly an interesting story.”

Steve chokes on a laugh. “I don’t need you to believe me, Dr Simmons,” he says. “That’s what all this is for—hard proof.”

“DNA sampling,” Simmons says, blinking, studying his face. Glances down to poke the needle into the sterile sample vial. “Blood and buccal cells. But that only proves—does SHIELD even have your DNA on file? I thought… it was my understanding that you’ve declined to donate blood or tissue for the record, from the beginning.”

“I’ve never consented to giving up samples of my DNA,” Steve says, watching—Simmons draws the needle out and shakes the vial, carefully puts the used sharp in a tea cup. “But SHIELD took ‘em anyway—when I first came outta the ice, before I woke up. Blood—lots of blood—cheek swabs, bone marrow. They did a lumbar puncture. Should have plenty of my DNA to compare ‘em side by side.”

Simmons meets his gaze again, sharp, studying. “That’s not in your file,” she says, putting the vial of blood to the side and slipping the tourniquet off his bicep.

“Not the official version of events,” Steve agrees. “But it happened anyway. I know, because I was hovering next to the exam table, watching ‘em do it.”

Simmons stops, looks up again from the sterile swab she’s just picked up, wild-eyed and mouth half-open around the question she’s choking on, stuck on.

“Sorcery,” Steve says, shrugs.

“I…” Simmons says, and there’s a hiccuping heartbeat of silence while she digests, and then: “Fine. Okay, fine,” she says, crisp as a winter morning. Pulls the swab out of the packaging, briskly inspects the seal to be sure it’s clean, cracks it open and pulls the white tip free. “Open wide, tongue to the side, please.”

She doesn’t believe him. That’s okay: he’s not here to plead his case.

Dr Simmons is SHIELD loyal, cast iron solid, and Goddamn good at her job—means that physical evidence coming from her hands is gonna be cast iron solid too.

Simmons swipes at the inside of his mouth, fits the swab back into its sterile tubing. “Done,” she says. Picks up the blood vial and offers both the samples back to him. Steve pulls his hands back, shakes his head.

“I’m not touching ‘em,” he says. “I can’t switch the samples or tamper with ‘em if I haven’t touched ‘em. You’re gonna turn them over to SHIELD when they get here in—what, ten minutes, maybe? I figure you’re gonna call this in twenty seconds after I leave.”

“You figure correctly,” Simmons says, all polite and plasticky brittle, and Steve nods, gets up from the barstool and shoves his sleeve back down.

“Thank you,” he says. “I really appreciate this. I’m sorry I scared you.”

“I was _startled_ ,” she says, like Heaven forbid she admit any kinda weakness in front of him, and then: “Are we done here?”

“Tell them what I told you,” Steve says. “Give ‘em the samples, so they can run their tests. And tell them… If they go to Peggy Carter, she can corroborate my story.”

Jesus, he’d give his left arm if he could go himself: sit in Peggy’s quiet room, in the restful smell of talc and soap and Chanel perfume and fading life. Tell her all about the Goddamn mess he’s got himself in this time. Maybe tell the story a few times, if she’s having a bad day.

But he can’t go near Peggy right now without compromising his story so—so he’ll do the smart thing. He’ll keep his distance.

“She won’t wanna talk—she’s been keeping my secrets for seventy years,” Steve says. “Tell them—when they go to her. Tell her I said it’s okay, that it’s time the truth came out. Tell her I said I’d invade Austria for her. She’ll know that’s from me.”

“What does Austria have to do with anything?” Simmons asks, samples clasped to her chest, and—she’s curious. Doesn’t wanna buy anything he’s selling, but he said _Peggy Carter_ and she’s turning like a sunflower into the light.

“She’ll know,” Steve says. “It’s the last thing I said to her before I boarded the _Valkyrie_.”

“Oh,” she says, soft, wondering, and Steve gives her a nod and crosses to the window, flips the latch and slides it open and climbs into the frame.

“That’s not—” Simmons begins, _not the fire escape_ , and Steve turns enough to throw her a sloppy salute and then taps his third dermal piercing—parachute spell—and lets himself fall forward out into nothing.

It’s a fourth-floor apartment— _go away go away_ of the parachute spell, enough to slow the fall—lands clean, jolt of the strain up his calves.

He’s Cap-shaped, falling controlled onto a razor-flat surface: not a big deal, but it sure looks fucking impressive. Which is strategic, now. He’s walking a fine line, making himself spooky enough to be desirable as an operative. Making it real clear to SHIELD that he’s capable of shit their physics can’t explain—but not a monstrous kinda spooky. Not the kinda scary you gotta put down, precautionary. He’s not one of the bad guys. Honest.

“Oh my giddy aunt,” comes thread-thin from above, Simmons’ voice wavering and breathless, and Steve taps at the lowest of his dermal anchors, drops the walking veil over himself and moves out.

Moves and—gentle run, he needs to be gone before SHIELD close in on this neighbourhood, this block, this building—down the sidewalk and up a cross alley, zig-zags veiled until he’s four blocks away, and then—anonymous dust-blue junker parked at the curb, and he crosses the street and climbs in the passenger side.

“So, this is kinda weird,” Natasha drawls, from the empty driver’s side seat, and then there’s a click of the key in the ignition and the engine turns over.

Steve huffs a laugh. He’d pasted a veil over her before going to Simmons—can’t compromise Natasha’s position with SHIELD—so they’re both invisible, invisible to each other, a car with no one in it that just started itself.

Reaches over and finds her wrist in the dark—warmth of skin and bone, brushes the fabric of her jeans—and then both their veils dissolve, rolling away like mist when the sun comes up.

“It’s done,” Steve says.

“Okay,” Natasha says, casting a quick look over her shoulder—empty road, silent streets—and then pulling out. “So we’ve established an evidence trail. Started reshaping the narrative. Phase one, ticked off. You know phase two is gonna be the hard part.”

Jesus Christ.

“I know,” Steve says, squirming in the seat until he can get a hand in his jeans pocket and find the dime stashed in there, pull through the anchored spell, drop a light veil over his features. Enough to trip up any kinda facial recognition tech running through the cameras at—at this traffic light, right here.

Natasha glances over, silent, watches him guise himself like she’s trying to find the sleight of hand, to spot the exact moment when he shoves a dove up his sleeve.

Silence for a couple minutes, rattle of the car engine and hum of music from bars as they drive past, and then Steve says, “Thank you, Natasha.”

Natasha doesn’t answer for another block or so, another traffic light flashing past, and then—“You know, I’m still gonna kill you if you’re not Rogers.”

“I know,” Steve says, turning the coin over in his hands. “You’re very reliable, Natasha. I appreciate the Hell outta that.”

Natasha makes a choked noise which dissolves into a laugh—her real laugh, uncultivated and graceless. “Now I know you’re the real Rogers,” she says, and her eyes gleam like gold and crimson and emerald shards, spilled over colour from the lights of DC at night.

*******

Phase two is waiting.

 _Hurry up and wait_ —like they say in the Army—and the thing is, once it all starts—the running or the fighting, shells falling, tanks advancing—well, you’re too Goddamn deep in it, in the mess and the shit, to think too hard about what the Hell is happening.

Too occupied to gnaw at the future, or regurgitate the past, or worry about your best girl, best guy, off someplace without you. Too occupied to do much of anything but deal with the Goddamn shit show happening right in front of you.

But _waiting_ —waiting, all you do is chew over every neurotic thought to ever hit your brainpan. Chew it over and choke it down and bring it up again, like a dog with its vomit.

Waiting makes you crazy.

Crazier, when you’re Steve.

So phase two is—Natasha goes, takes off back to SHIELD, folds back into the ranks like a good soldier, maybe takes part in the manhunt for one Captain Steve Rogers. Keeps her finger on the pulse of the investigation, keeps her distance, and then when it’s time for Steve to come in—

And Steve _waits_. He’s made his play; he’s gotta give SHIELD time to put the pieces together, time to pull at the threads he’s laid out for ‘em.

He waits, and—and going out, going out anywhere when there’s an active manhunt combing DC for him, is a stupid risk he doesn’t gotta take.

Stay off the playing field, stay off the radar. Stay locked down in Natasha’s safe house—safe apartment.

Christ, he could climb the fuckin’ walls—

He bug-sweeps the apartment—doesn’t find any monitoring equipment, but he does find three Glocks tucked into the furniture, and a machine gun mounted up under the benchtop in the kitchen, on top of the actual weapons cache in a safe at the bottom of the pantry.

He takes the guns apart and cleans ‘em and puts ‘em back together again, neat and clean. He paces. He layers up the spells anchored in his dog tags and piercings.

Takes another long-ass shower. Hand washes all his clothes in the bottom of the shower stall and hangs ‘em on a jerry-rigged washing line made outta an intravenous line from the first aid kit.

Paces again—couch, mattress, kitchenette, round into the bathroom and out again.

He needs to—if he stops moving he’ll start thinking, is the thing, and he’s maybe a gnat’s whisker away from a real Goddamn black hole in his head so he can’t, can’t let himself go there. Needs to—

Bucky is being held in a box even smaller than this one, and—and it’s been fuckin’ days since Steve’s clapped eyes on him, now. If they—if some Goddamn genius at SHIELD psych decides to try again with the _mild persuasive techniques_ , is anyone gonna speak up and tell ‘em no? Is he—is he eating, or—fuck. He’s gotta hold out. Just gotta hold out until—until they confirm he’s Bucky Barnes. Until they confirm he ain’t the enemy. _Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum_.

And Jesus Christ, if SHIELD don’t buy what Steve’s selling, if they track him down and bring him in as a _threat_ , he’ll go in a box too. This’ll be his life. Four walls and a cot and meals that come pasty and tasteless on a tray. Maybe some interrogation and softcore tortures for spice.

Christ on a cracker—

He eats an MRE and tidies away the trash. Paces again, lap after lap around the unit, slow and deliberate as he can.

He needs this to work—Mother Mary, fulla grace, he _needs_ this to Goddamn work.

If he’s got to—if he’s got no other option, he’ll burn this life and bail. Leave SHIELD and DC and the continental United States behind. And if they try and stop him taking Buck with him, he’ll fuckin’ burn SHIELD on his way out. He can’t be that selfless, can’t leave Bucky to—but if he does that.

If he does that—

Then SHIELD won’t be ready when the Mad Titan Thanos comes. The world won’t be ready. And three and a half billion people get to die bloody.

Jesus Christ, he _needs this to work_ —

Friday night, he switches the lights off and lies down on the mattress, tries to sleep.

Dreams he’s in the ice again. In the ice and in his body, mired in the feel of his cells stretched to bursting around ice crystals, of muscle fibres hardened to razor wire, the incandescent howling pain of it and—

—he can’t get out, he _can’t get out_ , he’ll be down here awake forever in the black and—

Wakes himself up grinding out a scream between sleep-locked teeth.

Saturday—fuck. Saturday.

Second verse, same as the first.

Sharpens his knives and paces and eats an MRE and vomits it back up and paces and doesn’t bother trying to sleep because he can’t, he can’t—

—and at some point in the afternoon his legs start shaking too bad to keep walking so he crawls across the mattress and dissolves. Lets his consciousness spill out from his body like soup leaking out of a bowl with a hairline crack.

Spills himself out wide into the cinder blocks and cement, the wires and pipes.

Time passes.

Time passes, and—

Beep of—something electronic— _phone_. The burner phone Natasha left for him—

Steve hauls himself back together, back into his body. Heaves his numb carcass up off the mattress and staggers, goes to his knees, mewling like a hungry pup against the ache of his body waking, nerves connecting to muscle to fibre to bone. Jesus, how… How long has he been out for?

He’s gotta crawl over to the sofa, pull himself upright.

Lurches on twitching legs over to the kitchenette, to the bench. To the shitty little flip phone sitting neatly squared in the middle of the beige island counter.

Picks up the phone and fumbles it open and—

It’s Sunday morning, is the first thing he notices. He’s lost sixteen hours, opting out of being Steve-shaped.

And then the next thing he sees is—it’s a text, three lines gleaming black against the pale green of the display:

_Ivy City_  
_B1 control centre  
_ _1000_

Steve takes a deep breath, lets it out slow, controlled, measured. Presses a fist to his chest and breathes there, basic-ass centring exercise his Da taught him most of a century ago, until his hands stop shaking and his heart stops fluttering.

Turns the phone over and pulls out the battery and SIM and puts all the pieces through the garbage disposal unit in the kitchen sink. Then he goes and gets mission ready.

Dog tags on, hair up and outta the way, a length of garrotting cord around and around his wrist like a bracelet. He straps on Natasha’s spare bulletproof vest over his T-shirt, tucks a ceramic knife into the top of his right boot and another into a hidden sheath at the small of his back, at the waist of his ink-black yoga leggings. Throws on an old leather jacket outta Natasha’s stash of spare clothes.

Cracks his knuckles and throws on an illusion and walks out into the world.

*******

At the SHIELD black site, Steve veils his way past the checkpoints, waits around invisible in the lobby at ground level until—Hill, Agent Maria Hill, striding into the space like a general onto the field of battle.

She’s got a couple junior agents trailing after her, and she’s rattling off instructions at ‘em, cold and brisk as machine-gun fire, and they’re nodding and blinking and making urgent notes on their phones and everyone is distracted enough that it’s a cake walk to follow ‘em into the lift and down.

Control centre, Basement One.

The junior agents peel off, head for workstations in the main control area, and Hill keeps going, on and through to a door in the back, into—

It’s a conference room. Same as they got in every Goddamn government building or corporate setup in the Western world—paste-coloured walls and cheap office tables laid out down the centre of the space.

Same set up as the sixth floor, where—where—

Fuckin’ Christ, man, it’s just a room.

Steve cracks his knuckles, flicks through a few conjuring gestures, automatic pilot. Fetches himself up against the back wall while Hill sets herself up at the table, dicks around on her tablet for a couple minutes, and then—

Coulson is the next one to filter in, and Natasha a couple minutes after him. Fury comes next, sits with his hands folded fist over fist on the tabletop in front of him. There’s no talk, none of the usual polite bullshit to take up empty air space. They’re quiet, contained, waiting, and then—

It’s Alexander Pierce who comes in last.

That older fella, from the World Security Council. Secretary Pierce—Steve racks his brain, tries to remember anything he mighta heard, anything he oughta know about this guy, but he’s coming up blank.

A name on a SHIELD memo a couple times, maybe, and speaking at that press conference. Secretary of the WSC, oversees SHIELD.

His suit looks cut sharp enough to shave with. Shiny shoes. Maybe in his mid-seventies. Alert, clear-eyed, pressed and dressed and dropping a phone into his pocket, shooing off a couple lackeys—

“Apologies, everybody. Terrorist cells don’t take my schedule into account, it seems,” Pierce says, closing the door behind him and taking a seat. “Where are we at with finding the infiltrator?”

Fury looks to Natasha, and she blinks, slow, catlike, shifting in her seat, Pygmalion’s ivory statue coming to life.

“We’re combing traffic and security cameras through the whole of DC—for what that’s worth, when he could wiggle his nose and look like anybody. We’re running speech recognition for his voice and vocal patterns via every cell phone and device in the wider metropolitan area. And we’re sweeping his apartment complex, and around the homes of known associates, with sniffer dog teams, three times a day.”

Scent—he can’t hide scent. They woulda caught him cold, if he’d been dumb enough to go back.

Thank God Natasha is helping him. If she’d come at him in earnest, he’d be screwed.

“We know he was fixated on our special detainee,” she’s saying. “So we’ve quadrupled our security measures on the detention level in case he makes a run at the Soldier. Equipped every one of our on-site operatives with thermal vision. Realistically, we’re waiting for him to screw up.”

“Which he will,” Fury says, level as a salt flat. “Everybody gets tired eventually.” He turns to Hill, taps at the tabletop with a couple fingers. “What did we get back from the lab? Who is this guy?”

Hill swipes at something on her tablet screen, and Steve shifts, moves to—get around behind her, try and look over her shoulder, but—but then she flicks up with a finger and the big wall-mounted screen lights up. It’s—it’s a bunch of lines, various bright colours, cross-hatched with other lines. Some kinda—chart, or a diagram—

“The lab results were—interesting,” Hill says. “This is a side-by-side of the DNA samples our fugitive gave up, and the DNA samples taken from Captain Steve Rogers immediately after he came out of the ice.”

She swipes again, and the images shift—numbers appearing, annotations. “They’re not a match,” Hill says. “Not exactly. Not enough to say that they’re the same guy. But they’re inhumanly close—closer than full-blood siblings.”

Shit. Steve— _fuck_. He shoulda expected this.

Should have expected that his DNA results would come back weird. He spins his Cap body up outta whole cloth every time he shifts shape—so, changes. Variation.

 _Shit_.

“We already know he’s a fake,” Pierce is saying.

Hill bobs her head—not agreeing, just—acknowledging that she’s heard, that she copies. Swipes again.

“It gets really weird when you look at this third sample—this was taken last week, by one of our techs in the medical unit at the Triskelion.”

What the Hell, when did—Christ.

When Steve was out cold, after getting the shit kicked outta him by the Soldier. After the gas, and that whole thing where he kinda died for a couple minutes.

And SHIELD took the opportunity to relieve him of a few fuckin’ DNA samples when he wasn’t awake to protest it. God _damn_ , he shoulda known—

“Again, not a match,” Hill says. “Not to _either_ sample. But it’s really close to both. Closer than any of the lab technicians could explain. It’s—the best they could describe it was: essentially the same DNA, but with a few pieces of data swapped around.”

There’s a good ten seconds of silence—Hill swipes again, a final screen with yet more lines and numbers. Then: “Clones?” Fury asks.

“We have three DNA sets. That would mean there’s now three of them,” Natasha says. “Who’s growing bulk-discount Captains America?”

“Techs said the DNA should be much closer to identical if they’re clones,” Hill says.

“Is there any record of the Captain’s DNA from Project Rebirth?” Pierce asks. “Any chance we could compare what we have to the original?”

“The last known sample of Steve Rogers’ blood was destroyed in 1946,” Hill says, flat as an ironing board. “DNA sequencing wasn’t perfected until the 50s.”

“Banner,” Coulson says, spills out, apropos of Goddamn nothing, and the talk grinds to a stop, everyone turning to look at—he’s staring at the tabletop, blinking hard, processing. “Doctor Banner,” he says again, and then—

“We have—there’s DNA on file. Bruce Banner, from before the serum test. And then after the test, after he’d been dosed with the serum and enough gamma radiation that his cancer oughta have cancer, but instead he just got big and green and pissed off. And—we’ve got vestigial samples from the Hulk—smears of blood. Not enough to get a full DNA profile, but enough to get an idea. Three different biological samples. And what that looks like…”

Coulson stops, sits back. He’s pale, his mouth pinched thin and flat. “It’s the same data. All three DNA profiles. Just—rearranged, some. And he’s only the one guy.”

Another long silence. Natasha crosses her legs—her gaze is roving from Coulson to Fury to Pierce to Hill and back around again, slow and deliberate, reading the room. Coulson swallows, hard.

“Huh,” Hill says at last, and puts her tablet down on the conference table.

“Sir, with permission, I’ll share my recording of the interview now,” Coulson says, pulling a phone out of his jacket pocket.

Fury nods—he’s got both hands on the table top, and Steve can read the tension in the lines of his shoulders, forearms—he’s holding himself still, still as granite, locking down hard, giving nothing away.

“Interview?” Pierce asks.

“I spoke to former Director Carter,” Coulson says, tapping at the phone in his hand.

There’s a couple heartbeats of silence, broken when Pierce says, “You—we actually went and harassed a ninety-three-year-old war hero in her nursing home? Based on the say-so of some rogue magic user? Why are we giving anything this fugitive says that much credit?”

“He’s been operating under all our noses for two solid years,” Natasha says, mild and smooth as vanilla ice cream. “I give him a great deal of credit.”

Another moment of dead-still as they stare at each other, studying, calculating—Jesus Christ, Natasha Romanoff has balls of solid steel, _that woman_ —

—and then Coulson says, “Here,” and taps his phone again and—

The image spills up onto the big screen—an unflattering opening glimpse up Coulson’s nostril, and then the video starts and his face comes proper into the frame.

“ _Agent Phillip Coulson_ ,” he says, and this voice comes—thin. Almost choked off. “ _SHIELD, Level Six. Date is Saturday, January 25th, at 11:20am. Interviewing Margaret Carter, former Director of SHIELD, retired, at her residence at the Silver Bough Rest Home_.”

The camera shot bounces, shifts, flashes of the room flying past—vanity mirror, the bunch of flowers Steve brought her last week, bedding and then—Peggy, sitting bolt upright in a mound of pillows—heaped up like a throne around her. She looks good, fixed in place and time, alert.

“ _Mrs Carter_ ,” Coulson says. “ _We were talking about Steve Rogers_.”

*******

“ _He was—something more than human. What exactly he was, I couldn’t say, and neither could he, but he wasn’t human. And he could wave a hand and work small miracles_ ,” Peggy says, and—

“ _A one man tactical deception unit. A ghost army,_ ” she says. “ _He could spin up a tank battalion from thin air, with his—his will, his mind, only God knows how it worked, but it did. I saw his work with my own eyes_ ,” and—

“ _I sent Steve and James after the most impossible targets—through the heart of fortified enemy territory, through the middle of actively contested ground, into the most closely guarded centres of the German and Italian military apparatus. And they got through, and they got out, unseen,_ ” and—

“ _I had no bloody idea how he did it,_ ” Peggy says, and Steve bites his lip, has to look away for a second—that makes two of us, Peg. “ _If he was an alien or an elf or a demon risen straight from the pit. But I knew he had capabilities that were unprecedented in the history of warfare, and it would have been mad not to put him to work,_ ” and—

And then she has a coughing jag, and when her chest clears again her mind’s clouded over, and she looks up with—Steve can recognise the fear, the creeping sense of horror that her mind is betraying her, that she can see it happening but not do a Goddamn thing to stop the rot, and—

“ _I’m sorry, I—what were you saying?_ ” she asks, shaky, trying to rally.

“ _I asked about the timeframe,_ ” Coulson says, slow, gentle. “ _About when you first learned about Captain Rogers’… extra-human skill set_.”

“ _I—I’m not sure what you’re suggesting_ ,” Peggy stumbles, touching the soft wisps of her silver hair, her mouth thinning. “ _There are tens of thousands of men and women who survived the war because of the work Captain Rogers and Sergeant Barnes did, and—_ ”

“ _Mrs Carter, it’s alright_ ,” Coulson’s voice comes, muffled. “ _Remember, Captain Rogers asked me to come and speak to you, to get the truth out—_ ”

Peggy makes a choked noise and her face transforms, grief and joy and—“ _He’s_ alive _?_ ” spills outta her, breaking in the middle, and—“ _Steve’s—they found him_?”

“ _I—Mrs Carter_ ,” Coulson is saying, stumbling like—he’s always smooth as a snake’s belly, but just then he doesn’t know what to say, how to fix—

—and she’s broken into sobs, racking sobs, and Steve closes his eyes, breathes deep and slow and controlled. Jesus, Peggy.

And then the soft rasping sound of fabric moving against the microphone, and Coulson again, saying: “ _Terminating recording at 11.29am_ ,” and then—

Silence.

There’s—Steve opens his eyes again, looks around.

The room is dead quiet, still enough to hear the brainless near-silent whine of the speaker system humming away to itself. Coulson is looking at the far wall, his expression a hollowed out kinda blank, fixing the cuff of his sleeve over his prosthetic—same tell he always has when he’s feeling a whole lotta something and needs to let it spill out somewhere. Hill is frowning down at her paperwork like it personally insulted her mother. Pierce looks—annoyed, rattled.

Fury is looking at the blank screen, his gaze distant—running calculations, turning all the pieces over in his head, and—and Natasha is sitting, hands folded, her stare fixed on Fury and her expression blank slate as a corpse.

The quiet stretches out, taffy in winter kinda slow, and then—

“Former Director Carter has Alzheimer’s,” Coulson says, calm and bland as wallpaper paste. “So her memory of the events of the last couple of decades is unreliable. Incomplete. But her memories of the Second World War are solid. And every time I asked her—because we had that same conversation three times through—every time I asked, her answers were totally internally coherent and consistent. Margaret Carter is on the record stating that Captain Steve Rogers accomplished the S.R. missions through the use of sorcery.”

There’s another couple heartbeats of silence, and then—

“Well, shit,” Fury says, and—

“This is preposterous,” Pierce snaps.

“Which part, exactly?” Natasha asks, one eyebrow lifting as she turns to face him.

“Any or all of it,” Pierce answers. “Are we seriously to believe that Steve Rogers lied to the world for decades? That Captain America is an alien spy? That SHIELD ran an intelligence campaign throughout the bloodiest days of World War Two using _magic_? This is—children’s stories.”

“Well, consider the sorcerer Loki,” Natasha says, and for a heartbeat Steve’s blood goes to frozen razor wire, jolting like he’s touched his tongue to one of her taser discs, but she’s still talking, continuing—

“Loki used sorcery to end-run around every layer of security we had on the helicarrier before the Battle of New York. He made it look easy. Therefore it’s possible—and if it was possible for one magic user in 2012, then it musta been possible for another magic user in 1945. I have to at least consider the possibility that Steve Rogers was something other than human, before a German scientist pumped him full of patriotic steroids.”

“But this is _Captain America_ ,” Pierce says, hands spreading like he’s holding the weight of that Goddamn stupid legacy between ‘em.

“And he was Steve Rogers first,” Coulson says. “He was Steve Rogers before, during, and after he became a super soldier, and Steve Rogers was never a perfect man. I mean, he lied to the federal government five times, trying to enlist—we still have the records. Whether that means he was capable of deception on this kind of scale? I don’t know. I don’t know what to think anymore.”

“So we have nothing solid,” Pierce says, sitting back from the table.

“We have reasonable doubt,” Natasha says, calm and cold and untouchable as the moon.

There is silence for a long moment. Pierce stares at Natasha, who crosses her legs and trains her gaze on Fury.

Fury is—he’s watching all of ‘em, his gaze flicking between everybody and up to the blank screen and around again, studying, weighing, running the equations in his head.

And then—

“Stand down the search for Captain Rogers,” Fury tells Hill, and she’s nodding, immediately pulling out a phone and uncoiling to stand, go make the call, slipping out into the corridor and—

“Based on the confused ramblings of an unwell nonagenarian and some inconclusive blood results?” Pierce asks, nesting blunt fingers together like a sniper’s stand.

“Based on my best gut feeling,” Fury says, and his eye goes to—to Natasha, and then Coulson. Both nod, silent. “And the gut feelings of my best agents. If Rogers was planning to move against SHIELD, he’s had two years to do it. He’s not a threat to us.”

Silence for a long minute, Fury and Pierce staring at each other, unblinking. Pierce’s gaze is surgical, dissecting; Fury’s got all the expression and about as much give as a granite cliff face.

“I made you Director of SHIELD because I trust your judgement, Nick,” Pierce says at last. “Because I’ve seen you make calls that a lesser man wouldn’t have, time and again, under fire and under pressure, and they were the right calls. I hope this decision doesn’t break your streak.”

“I appreciate your confidence, sir,” Fury says.

“Keep me informed,” Pierce says, getting up. “If Rogers—or whoever this person is—ever turns up, I want to know.” He pulls his phone out to glance at the screen and pockets it again, turns to go.

“Sir,” Fury says, level and agreeable, and then Pierce is gone, and Natasha is getting up, smoothly rounding up Coulson—

“—get you to look this over with me? I’ve been staring at the same floor plan for too long,” she’s saying, and Coulson is tucking his stack of file folders under his left arm and going with, both of ‘em sweeping out of the room—

Which leaves Fury.

Steve walks veiled over to the conference room door. Rolls his wrists and conjures a light _don’t-notice-me_ veil, smears it across the door, the door jamb and handle, and then he pulls the door closed and flips the lock over, smooth and silent.

Turns around. Director Fury is still sitting, his single dark eye fixed up on the now blank screen—where Steve’s DNA was diagramed out, dissected in black and white. Where Peggy Carter sat, enthroned, imprisoned, and told her part of Steve’s story.

Christ on a crutch. All his secrets are spilling out, tumbling down, the card shark with aces falling out of his sleeve.

This _has to work_. God in Heaven— _Ave Maria, gratia plena_ —Steve _needs_ this to work. For the three and a half billion human lives that’ll be lost when Thanos comes, if the world isn’t ready. For Bucky, pared down to instinct and violence and razor wire.

For himself.

Steve lets his breath out, slow and controlled and easy. Drops his veil.

Clears his throat and says, “Sir.”

Fury’s eye snaps to him, flares wide for half a heartbeat and then narrows. He doesn’t move for a long moment, still and poised as a hunting cat. Then he shifts his weight in the chair, shoulders back and head up and squaring on like a boxer in the ring.

“You,” he says. “I might’ve known.”


	10. Chapter 10

“I guess—” Steve starts, stops. Breathes. Wets his lips. “I guess I should start at the beginning.”

“I’m listening,” Fury says, shifting lower in his seat, real casual. Puts his hand closer to the concealed gun under his jacket.

But he hasn’t—hasn’t pulled the gun out, hit a panic button, called for help.

He’s listening.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, this might just work.

Steve takes a deep breath, lets it out again, slow.

“I never met my Da,” he begins. “He was outta the picture before my Mam ever left Ireland. But I know his name _wasn’t_ Joseph Rogers.”

*******

It ain’t the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help him, God. But it’s closer to the truth than he’s ever spoken aloud before, the whole story from the beginning, learning sorcery in Brooklyn, going off to War—

He _can’t_ tell the whole truth. He can’t.

The whole truth is _Loki_ , is Ulfadhir, amoral and cunning as a rabid fox, grinning white and fierce as he showed Steve how to turn a knife in his hand, how to pick a lock, how to conjure a seeming and walk through a crowd unseen. And if Steve tells ‘em about Loki, about his Da, the rest will fall out after it, links in a chain. New York, and after New York, when Steve broke Loki out of SHIELD’s containment unit under Times Square.

And no amount of goodwill from Fury, of trust from Natasha, is gonna make up for that. They’ll put him in a black box in the lowest level of the Fridge and forget about him for that one.

So he’s gotta—extemporise, some.

Invent a sorcery teacher—Mr West, one his course instructors in college. _Contemporary Movements in Art and Design_ , and also _seidhr_. Guy’s long since dead, and he’d been old enough and queer enough that there’s not likely to be any grandkids around for SHIELD to follow up with.

And that’s about the only lie he’s gotta tell—

—okay, so he darts real lightly over some of the fine points.

No one needs the gruesome details of what actually happened in the Vita Ray chamber, how Erskine’s serum hurt worse’n fucking dying and then didn’t work.

Or the Godawful months of getting the hang of his shapeshifting, his shape change spell unraveling in hotel rooms across America, in the toilet cubicles in restaurants, that one time it came apart hard and fast and he had to start a small fire in the back of the theatre to make up a reason why he couldn’t go onstage that night.

They don’t need to know about him and Buck, falling together and falling apart and—that’s not just his secret to tell. Bucky might not remember anymore, and that doesn’t matter a Goddamn—Steve’s not gonna out him.

They don’t need to know about the ice—they all think he napped seventy years away, like Sleeping fuckin’ Beauty. Let ‘em keep thinking that, he doesn’t gotta—regurgitate all it—the dark and the cold, the terrible silence, the wolves. The feel of forcing his way back into his flesh, into his frozen side of beef body, feeling the bite of the ice in every cell, his lungs and fucking eyeballs—

Let the story stand, as it is. Skip a few decades, and—

“I saw what happened to Banner,” Steve says. “The way he’d spent most of his adult life on the run, because the Army wanted to pull him apart down to the cells, find out how he ticks. And I wanted—wanted to help people, protect people, wanted to keep fighting, but I couldn’t risk ending up like Banner, so… So I hid. Hid what I am. Joined SHIELD and kept hiding in plain sight.”

“About that,” Fury says. “It’s been a while since my high school modern history class, but I don’t remember Steve Rogers having alien eyes and _feathers_ before he got the serum.”

“I didn’t—I didn’t used to,” Steve says, looking down at his hands, his forearms, where the sleeves of Natasha’s jacket have ridden up. At the blaze of white and blue and grey and brown and black feathers, sprawled across his skin, bright and clean and photorealistic but smooth, flush to the skin. Too many days on the wing, borrowing in the bodies of owls and eagles, cormorants, gulls.

“I—what I am, my sorcery. It’s—corrosive, I guess. Wears itself into your skin after a while. I used to look a Hell of a lot more like the human half of my family tree.”

“I’ve run into aliens that could transform, look like somebody else, before,” Fury says, and he slowly stands, uncoiling, one hand coming down to press steepled fingertips to the tabletop. “Let’s just say that whole chapter has left me with some trust issues.”

Shit, that’s—that’s a problem, one Steve couldn’t have anticipated. One Natasha couldn’t have anticipated.

When the Hell did _shapeshifting aliens_ get to Earth, and what happened to—Christ on a cracker.

“I’m not them,” Steve says. “I’m not. I’m fifty-percent human by weight. Mam was never sure what the Hell my Da was—maybe an elf or a fairy, I think, something out of the old stories of the Good Neighbours. But I’m hers too, and she was human, and she was good people. I’m not a threat to you and yours, and—and I don’t know how else to prove it to you.”

Fury is silent for a long moment, still as a corpse, then he says, “The Bolivian mission, San Joaquin. I had a couple things to say to you afterwards.”

Steve blinks, turns it over in his—oh. Okay, this is—

“You reamed me out. I left my support team behind at the compound wall because they couldn’t move fast enough to keep up with me,” he says—and that’s not in the official mission report. Not on file anywhere.

Steve and Fury were the only ones in on that fuckin’ delightful conversation, Fury’s office at ten o’clock at night, Steve still reeking of smoke and with half the mud in South America caked up his legs.

He’s—this is a test—things that only Steve Rogers, that only Captain America, would know.

“Tell me about Mogadishu,” Fury says, and—

It’s most of an hour, one part interrogation and one part debrief.

Some of what Fury’s asking is SHIELD era stuff, ops Steve’s run over the last couple years. And then every now and then Fury throws in a question from the War, missions he did with the Commandos, missions he did with Buck and Peggy—

“February of ’44, Sicily. The destroyer _Ascari_ ,” Fury says, and Steve answers—

“That one was mostly Bucky’s work,” Steve says. “I conjured the veil spells, got us onto the ship and kept us hidden outta sight, but Buck was the one who worked out how to sabotage their torpedo armament,” and—

And then the questions stop and it’s quiet again, drawing out and out, and Steve is aware of the rasp of his own breathing, of the relentless hum of song—of the building, parade ground martial, and Fury’s song, strange and soft and mutable, leaves moving against leaves and a blade moving against a whet stone.

And then—

“I like your brass,” Fury says. “You were skilled enough to get in here. _And_ you’re crazy, and unpredictable. And that I do _not_ like.”

Another silence, stretching taut as piano wire, and Steve wets his lips again, scrambling for—anything, any Goddamn thing he can say to—

“You get one shot,” Fury says. “One—let’s call it a trial period. You do your job. You bring your full skillset to the table. _Show_ me what you can do. You do some good work, stay _on_ the radar. Keep your nose clean. I’ll have my eye on you. You do good, I can be forgiving.”

“How long is a trial period?” Steve asks.

“You’ll know when it’s over,” Fury says, which—could not possibly sound more fuckin’ ominous, only—

It’s a shot. A chance to get back on the inside, back into the fight. He’ll take it, grab on with both hands and dig in with claws and teeth and not let up until it’s stone dead.

He needs SHIELD. They need Cap, they need S.R., but— _fuck_. The world needs SHIELD.

“I can do that. Sir,” Steve says, and the words drop into silence, like they’re dropping into a well, the room falling to quiet as Fury studies him, so still he’s scarcely breathing—

And then he moves, out from behind the table, puts his hand out to shake. Steve lets out a breath, and—and when he reaches back, puts his own hand out in reply, it’s trembling, shaking hard, aching in his knuckles where he’s letting go of the hex spell he’s been holding there for the last hour and change.

They shake. Fury looks him in the eye, quirks a wry twitch of his mouth. Says: “Welcome to SHIELD, S.R.”

*******

Out in the control centre, Natasha is cocked-hip leaning against a work station, standing with—it’s Clint Barton, Hawkeye, in his tac suit like he’s just come from a mission. Or is about to roll out for a mission.

It’s just the two of ‘em, heads together and talking soft, close, and when the door opens they both snap to attention and look around, smooth and synchronised and—

Clint’s gaze lands on Steve, lodges there like a mushroomed bullet.

He’s a spy, so he’s got a Goddamn good poker face, but Steve can read the—the fascination, and suspicion, around his eyes and in the line of his jaw.

Natasha must have briefed him, given him some idea what to expect, but—it’s a lot, Steve knows better’n anyone. He’s a lot to take in.

“Barton,” Fury says, and Clint’s gaze snaps to him. “With me.”

Fury ducks back into the conference room and Clint follows, tips Steve a nod on his way past.

And then the door closes and it’s just Steve, Natasha, and the attentive gaze of however many cameras are in here. Steve can hear the song that means surveillance, the particular electronic purr of watching eyes. Hears it just about everywhere he goes in SHIELD facilities, these days.

He’s gotta get used to that, now. No way in Hell Fury’s gonna let him go free range, now he knows what Steve is, what he’s capable of. He’s gonna have eyes on him, when he eats and sleeps and shits and—out and out, into the future. Until he either earns back some measure of trust, or screws the pooch altogether.

Natasha crooks him a smile—careful, measured. She’s gotta know this place is monitored, probably knows the exact whereabouts of every camera, every bug.

Jesus, when she came in from the cold. When she defected from the KGB. Was this what it was like for her?

“Hey,” Natasha says, breaks the silence.

“Hey, Nat,” Steve says, like this is the first time they’ve seen each other in a while, because this is how they have to play it. If SHIELD ever finds out Natasha was helping him, they’ll both be in the shit too deep to swim.

“No hard feelings about the manhunt, right?” Natasha asks, pitching it low and quirking an eyebrow— _are you okay_ , is what she’s asking, and—

“Never hard feelings between us, Agent Romanov,” Steve says, and he lets a little of his dog-tired fuckin’ misery and relief seep into his voice, enough that she’ll know he’s genuine, that he’s answering with _I’m okay_ and _thank you_ and _I owe you so Goddamn much for this_.

Natasha smiles, genuine, flaring across her face like a flash grenade bursting, there and gone again as she ducks her head, and when she lifts her face again she’s got it wired down, porcelain mask back in place.

“What now?” she asks.

“Now I have a trial period,” Steve says. “And a chance to prove I’m not the pod person who stole Captain America’s life.”

Natasha lifts an eyebrow and smiles, crooked—“Classic sci-fi reference. Has Stark hacked your Netflix account?”

“Sorry, what’s a Netflix?” Steve answers, his best confused nonagenarian impression, like when he pretends he doesn’t know what a juicer is or how barcodes work.

“Is Fury putting you on ops?” Natasha asks, crossing her arms and dropping deeper into her lean against the bench.

“Guess so,” Steve says. “Still a whole lot of Hydra out there, and me with nothin’ but time on my hands,” and—

And the conference room door opens again, Clint emerging. He’s—his face is locked down hard, expression hollowed out bland, but there’s something—fraying, kinda unhinged, around his eyes, and then Fury appears in the doorframe and—

“Agent Romanov,” Fury says. “With the search stood down, I have a real assignment for you.”

“Sir,” Natasha says, immediate and crisp as a freshly printed bill, bouncing up from her lean and marching forward.

She doesn’t slow down, as she moves past Steve. Doesn’t hesitate. SHIELD is gonna be pulling apart every interaction Steve’s had since he came outta the ice; studying his movements down to the molecular level for suspicious shit. Natasha can’t be too familiar now, can’t get too close. But she looks Steve in the eye, breathes, “No rest for the wicked,” low enough only Steve and Clint’ll hear it, and then—

And then she’s gone, door closed behind her, and Steve didn’t get to—to say _goodbye_ , to really actually thank her for all of this, to exchange so much as a fucking fist bump. And he owes her _everything_ , and—

“So,” Clint says, jolts Steve out of his Goddamn spiral, and Steve blinks, looks at him—looks up. Jesus Christ, but that’s weird—he’s only ever been around Clint in his Cap shape, in his big body, so he’s used to having a couple inches on the guy.

Steve figured out shapeshifting when he was twenty-four, which means he’s had seventy-three years to get used to the idea, and yet still it fuckin’ throws him now and again—what a Goddamn freak show he is, and—

“So I’m your shadow now,” Clint says. “As per Director Fury. Until this whole _secretly-an-alien-sorcerer_ thing blows over.”

Oh, fuck.

Wait, wasn’t—“I thought you were having some leave, next couple of months?” Steve asks, remembers some kinda talk in the locker room. Something about hitting the beach down in Mexico, maybe.

“I was,” Clint says, and that pinched look comes back into his eyes. “And then Hydra turned out to be still around, and Captain America turned out to be a rogue magic user on the run from the law. So Fury called me back in.”

Shit. “I’m sorry, man,” Steve says.

“It’s the job,” Clint says, shrugs with one shoulder, and there’s—that tension is still there, around his eyes. It’s not okay, he’s not okay, but it’s the job, and Clint is a Goddamn professional, rolls with the punches better’n just about anybody Steve’s ever worked with, and—

“So I figured first stop, we’d go down and see your guy.”

Steve—stops. Blinks. Blinks harder, sucks in a breath and—

“Yeah,” he says, and it comes out shaking, twisted up.

Stop. Breathe again.

He’d told Fury that he was gonna want to see Buck, but he figured he’d have to earn back that right in blood and sweat. Figured he’d have to veil up and sneak down, if he wanted to see Buck anytime between now and doomsday. “Yeah, I—yes. I wanna go see Bucky. Thank you, Clint.”

*******

In the lift, Steve tugs at the cuffs of Natasha’s jacket, makes sure they’re sitting so they’ll cover his feather markings. Closes his eyes and digs in the back of his brain for the illusion he uses when he’s passing for human—just enough of a seeming to hide his fangs away, make his wolf eyes look normal.

Pulls the spell up and through, hums and twists his fingers into a couple of conjuring gestures until the power burns through and out, wrists hands fingertips—

Settles over his face, static-brushing at his skin like the lace of a bridal veil.

He opens his eyes, blinks a couple times until his brain stops losing its shit over the feel of magic clinging like frost to his eyelashes.

Clint is watching, studying, a fixed neutral kinda look on his face.

“So when we were fighting Loki,” Clint says, breaks the silence. “Is what you do anything like what he does?”

Christ on a crutch.

Steve does not want anyone saying his name and _Loki’s_ in the same breath. If folks start connecting those dots, drawing comparisons, he’s gonna be fucked beyond all recognition real fast.

And of course Clint’s gonna think about Loki—he’d seen him up close and personal. Danced on his strings and fought and killed for him under the influence of that Goddamn sceptre. So of course Clint’s gonna go there, he’s got every reason to—

The lift stops and Steve twitches, snaps outta it— _say something, idiot, say_ anything—

“I mean, yeah, like counting apples and running the equations to put men on the moon are both mathematics,” Steve says, smoothly moving forward as the lift doors slide open. “That guy was light-years ahead of anything I can do. If I’d gone at him with sorcery, it would have been like taking a pocket knife to a nuke fight.”

It ain’t even a lie.

Out into the corridor, Basement Three.

Soulless flat white of the walls and—bear right, down the hall, and Steve’s gotta focus to keep his pace measured, controlled, because the dumb animal part of his brain wants to _run_.

It’s been days, it’s been fuckin’ days, and Bucky—

“Well,” Clint drawls from behind, from over Steve’s shoulder. “Use your pocket knife to cut the right wire, you take out the other guy’s nuke.”

Goddamn, but Clint is as sharp as a surgeon’s blade. Fury asked him to play babysitter for a reason—this is the start of Steve’s trial period, the first of many tests.

Steve breathes out, slow and controlled, cracks his knuckles, keeps moving forward.

Walks into the security hub off Bucky’s cell.

There’s—it’s the same two agents from Steve’s first visit, Tan and Sitwell again—and they’re up on their feet the second they see him, recognise him, sidearms drawn and levelled at Steve’s face.

“Stand down, guys. Fury’s cleared it,” Clint says, and then: “Pickled beets,” which—what in the Christ—

—must be some kinda pass phrase because they’re holstering their guns, slow, sitting down and turning back to their monitors, to—

“Buck,” Steve says, stepping close enough to the nearest monitor to see—

He’s stood dead centre of the cell, parade rest, metal hand clamped around his right wrist, eyes fixed on the rear wall. Thousand-mile stare, face vacant as a mannequin in a derelict storefront, and he’s so Goddamn pale he’s grey around the mouth, bags under his eyes like bruises.

“Jesus,” Steve mutters, leans in with a hand on the back of Tan’s chair, and then: “Is he—is he getting much sleep?”

“Uh. That would be a no. He hasn’t slept since the, uh, sedative gas.” Tan answers, fingertips of her left hand tapping at the desk top, dysrhythmic and sharp.

Since the gas—shit. Jesus fuckin’—“That was _Tuesday_ ,” Steve says—and he was due to wake on Wednesday morning, last Steve heard, which means… ballpark of ninety-six hours without sleep.

“God damn—is he eating?” Steve asks.

“Not really,” Sitwell says, and—

“Son of—” Steve spits, and then drops his head and makes a guttural noise that’s closer to a growl than anything human.

“Guys. There are laws about the humane treatment of prisoners, am I right?” Clint asks, toneless and flat and deadly as a blade, and Steve feels a flicker of warmth somewhere in his chest—something like gratitude and something like he’s bleeding out—as he straightens up, digs his clawed hand outta the back of the chair, marches over to the sealed door.

“We’re not depriving him. He’s getting three squares provided, scheduled time with the lights down. Access to a shower, if he wants it. He’s just—not engaging. In anything,” Tan says, her fingers tapping faster at the table, and Sitwell jumps in:

“The director knows, Head of Security knows. Psych are having input, it’s just—there’s nobody home,” he says, leaning back from his console.

Steve lifts a hand and slaps it on the plated steel of the door. “Let me in.”

Tan looks to Clint, eyebrows cocked. “Escort?”

“No escort,” Steve snaps, and Clint blinks, turns to Steve, and he’s got his best salt-of-the-earth, regular guy kind of face on. Like he’s gonna be the voice of reason right now.

“Steve, man,” Clint starts, and—

“No, come on,” Steve says. “You just heard them say he’s been catatonic for four Goddamn days. He was responsive with me, he talked, he ate—”

“He kicked the shit outta you,” Clint cuts across. “Remember that part?”

“Until the day I die,” Steve says. “But I know who to blame for that, and it’s not Buck. It’s the assholes who’ve been putting electricity through his brain for the last seventy years. And I—I screwed up that day. Miscalculated. Went in too fast, wearing the wrong face. I won’t make that mistake twice.”

There’s a moment of silence, Clint’s mouth working noiselessly, and then: “Wearing the _wrong face_ ,” he repeats.

Steve spreads his hands, the shopkeeper displaying his wares, himself. “Shapeshifter,” he says, baldly. “I got a couple different ugly mugs to choose from.”

“Right,” Clint says, thin and kinda faint, eyes fixed somewhere over Steve’s shoulder as he turns this idea over in his head, and—

“So I’m going in there alone,” Steve says. “Because I’ve got a shot at getting through to him. Because he knows I ain’t a threat. And you can all just Goddamn watch me through the glass.”

“And if he goes berserker on you again?” Clint asks.

“Then someone—” and Steve’s waving a hand at Sitwell and Tan, watching with mute fascination, waving at their console of buttons and screens and—“Hits the big red button and gases us both to Hell.”

“Solid plan,” Sitwell mutters.

“He ain’t ate or slept in four days,” Steve rasps. “Clint. Please. You gotta let me try.”

Clint opens his mouth, closes it. He’s quiet for a minute, processing, running the risk analysis through his head. And then he makes a noise somewhere between a sigh and a grunt, puts a fist to his forehead. “Yeah, okay.”

There’s another couple seconds of hesitation—Sitwell and Tan looking at Clint, at Steve, at each other, at Bucky on their monitors, and—Steve hikes his leg up bent and pulls the ceramic knife from his boot, slaps it down on the counter. Fishes the second blade from the sheath at his back and makes a matched set.

“Well?” he asks, breaks the silence, and Tan rolls her neck side to side—like she’s shrugging off a weight—and then reaches over and hits a button.

Door opens—through into the lock, door seals closed behind him, and then silence, broken by the hair-fine wailing song of the radiation, x-rays spilling through the chamber for a second and then cutting out again and—

And then the far door opens and Steve’s through, he’s in.

Staring at the line of Bucky’s back, still wearing the same navy blue scrubs and bare feet and—and there’s bruising around his right wrist, where his metal fingers are digging into the flesh.

He’s shaking, too slight for the cameras to pick up. Doesn’t move or look around when the door opens and closes.

And he stinks, stinks like—well, like an adult human fella who’s been in a couple fistfights, got dosed up with experimental chemistry, hasn’t bathed in a week.

“Buck?” Steve tries.

There’s no response—doesn’t so much as twitch. He’s gone deep, gone a long way out to sea. His song is slow, slowed right down, and twice as Goddamn awful like this because Steve can hear every tooth of the metal saw hitting bone, every welded join in the steel of the train tracks.

Okay then. Okay, so maybe—

Steve starts across the room, coming around so he can look Bucky in the eye, and he’s—still, motionless, a puppet with the strings cut. Silent. Shaking.

Steve can see his face now—Holy Mary, he looks like a corpse close up: bloodless and sunken and wasted—“Buck,” Steve tries again.

No reaction. He’s staring, unfocused, blinking maybe once every minute or so.

Steve takes a slow breath—please, God, anyone: _don’t let me fuck this up, again_ —and then he steps in, reaches out slow and easy, puts his hands on Bucky’s shoulders. “Buck? It’s me. Need you to come back, pal.”

Still nothing. Fuck, okay—Steve slides his hands down and around, down until the papery fabric of the scrubs gives way to flesh, to metal—razor-fine edges of the metal plates and—finds his hands, where the weapon hand is clamped down, biting in.

“ _Soldat_ ,” Steve says, firmer, and Bucky—breathes in, _hard_ , shudders, blinks—

“That’s it, buddy,” Steve says, and wedges his fingers in under Buck’s, pries and lifts until he lets go, lets Steve haul his hands around to the front. He’s pliable as a marionette.

Steve brings Bucky’s meat hand up and—there are welts cut into the flesh of his wrist, where the edges of plates caught and bit. Steve lets a breath out, brings that hand up until he can get a decent look at—lines of bright blood. Red, angry, not swollen, not infected.

He’s got the idiot urge to press his lips there, same as his Mam always kissed his knees and knuckles and nose when he’d got hurt brawling, falling off things. Before he’d got too old and ungrateful to put up with that much tenderness.

Stupid, stupid—he can’t—not with all of SHIELD watching, through the glass, through their fuckin’ Panopticon of cameras and electronic eyes. Not with an illusion pasted across his mouth, hiding away his ugly fuckin’ fangs. He presses the callused pad of his thumb over the worst of the welts and breathes out.

There’s an old scar across Bucky’s knuckles that Steve remembers from the Forties, so faded it’s almost invisible, shiny pale against the ground-in grey of his skin. Buck came back from fighting in the Pacific with that scar, and Steve never did hear the story of how he got it. Most of Bucky’s Goddamn life is like that now: old and new scars, wars that he never got to come home from, horrors that Steve doesn’t know about, can’t even begin to imagine.

Steve looks up and meets Bucky’s eyes: he’s tracking, hazy but starting to focus in.

“That’s it,” Steve says, giving him a pasted-on grin. “Come on back, Bucky. You remember who I am?”

“ _Moi…_ Steve,” Buck rasps, voice coming thin and rough like he’s been chewing sand, and then his eyes dart to the side, jaw works, and he centres up again. “You… stole me.”

“That’s right,” Steve says. “I stole you from Hydra. You’re my soldier now. And our first mission is giving you back to you.”

*******

He gets Bucky sitting on the narrow ledge of the bed, gets him drinking tap water from Steve’s cupped palms—“Until you’re not thirsty, okay? Stop when you’re not thirsty any more, Buck.”

And then the door slides open for a couple seconds, and it’s Clint sliding a meal tray in over the floor—he’s watching Steve, watching Buck where they’re sitting on the bunk, where Steve’s got Bucky’s hands in his, counting over his fingers, one of the basic centring exercises his Da taught him most of a century ago.

Clint looks—studiously neutral: his face is a careful blank. But he’s watching them close, their hands and the lines of their bodies and Steve can see him doing the math and then—the door slides closed again.

Steve takes a steadying breath—he’s running outta closets to come out of, all his secrets spilling, and—and Clint hasn’t flipped his shit over Steve being secretly a half-alien sorcerer, so—so it’s good odds he’s not gonna flip his shit over Steve being a giant fuckin’ fairy.

Maybe. Please, Christ—“Third finger,” Steve says, and if his voice comes out kinda thin and worn, Bucky’s not gonna be the guy to call him on it. “Breathing in, slow, count of three, okay?”

Bucky is—when Steve’s touching him, talking to him, he’s here: pale eyes kinda hazy like he’s got kicked in the head, but—attentive, can follow instructions. He’s still silent, jaw working mutely, scrapes out words a couple at a time like he’s gotta dig for ‘em, like Hydra or the Red Room poured a layer of concrete over that part of his soul a long time ago.

He’s still a blank slate, expressionless as the moon—Steve can read the traces of movement in his jaw and brow, around his eyes, aborted hints of—confusion, anger. Fear.

The second Steve stops talking, stops touching, it’s like the lamp at the top of the lighthouse goes out and the mists creep in again.

“Here,” Steve says. “You need to eat something,” and then it’s ten minutes of watching Bucky pick at his meal tray, eat a triangle of sandwich and maybe half a banana, slow and cautious like one of ‘em is wired to a detonator—followed by another ten minutes of holding Bucky’s hair out of his face while he vomits everything back up into the toilet.

“Has anyone with an _MD_ after their name even looked at him since he’s been in here?” Steve yells over at the glass, between Bucky’s heaves of near-silent retching.

Turns out the answer is _yes_ , but only through the glass—their Goddamn _updated risk assessment profile_ means no one has actually walked into the cell since fuckin’ Wednesday—and—

“Best theory is that he’s withdrawing from… something,” Tan says through a hidden speaker, voice spilling outta the walls. “Based on his, uh, behaviour. They figure Hydra had him on something. A lotta somethings: uppers, downers. Anti-psychotics. Superhuman-grade Adderall. But the docs wanna keep an eye out for refeeding syndrome, too.”

“What the Hell is refeeding syndrome?” Steve asks, picking a pea-sized lump of something unspeakable outta Buck’s hair where it got in the firing line.

“That’s, uh, when you’ve starved someone for a while and then they start eating again and their electrolytes are all funked up,” Tan says, and then: “Think you can get some blood off him while you’re in there?”

Steve learned how to tap a vein way the Hell back in the War—was part of Morita’s field first aid crash course—so they slide in a sterile tray, needles and blood tubes. Steve grabs the polystyrene cup from the tray and gets Buck to rinse and spit a couple times, steers him back over to the bed. Finds a vein in the fold of Bucky’s right elbow and draws off some blood while Buck stares at the wall, washed pale with exhaustion and Christ only knows what else—pain, withdrawal, refeeding Goddamn syndrome.

“You remembering anything new, pal?” Steve asks, smoothing the bandaid on over the minute puncture wound in Buck’s elbow when he’s done.

Bucky blinks, slow, rolls his eyes down from the wall to look at Steve’s face, his chin. He almost never makes eye contact: he’ll study your face like he’s watching for tells in a poker game but he ends up fixing on your chin or your ear, never the eyes, never—

Wets his lips and then grates out: “I’m _complying_.”

He’s tensed up, subtle, pulling taut in the muscles down his meat arm and across his shoulder like he’s braced for something, for—“Yeah, you’re complying. It’s okay, man, you’re okay.”

Complying good, remembering bad.

_Fuck_ Hydra, fuck Department X, fuck every single asshole who’s put a Goddamn hand on Buck in the last seventy years, fuck ‘em with a rusty chainsaw.

“We’re okay,” Steve says, keeping his voice light, holding enough tension in his wrists and forearms so his hands don’t shake. Scoops up Bucky’s hand and holds it between his own and squeezes hard.

He gets Bucky stretched out on the bed—it’s too narrow, too short, built for someone smaller—Banner, maybe, if he ever landed on SHIELD’s shit-list. Sits on the floor, back to the wall, where Buck can see him. There are still smears of old blood on the white of the wall here, from where Buck hurt himself, fingers into the meat of his shoulder in the utter dark of the blacked out chamber.

“Need you to get some shut-eye, now, pal,” Steve says, and Bucky’s watching his mouth move, wolf-grey eyes hazy, half-lidded. “This—our mission needs you sharp, full strength. I’ve got the watch, okay? You can rest.”

It’s most of an hour before Buck switches off, shuddering and twitching down into sleep like it’s contested territory, enemy occupied. Steve stays, matching his breath to Bucky’s and keeping the watch, until Clint comes back to the door and gives him a nod.

Time to go.

*******

“This isn’t my first rodeo,” Clint says, as they’re waiting for the lift.

Steve blinks, looks away from the bleak white of the wall. Finds Clint watching the number display above the lift doors, like they’re gonna show the winning lottery numbers any minute now. He doesn’t look away when he continues.

“When Nat joined SHIELD, came in from the cold, I was her shadow for most of that first year. Fury, he doesn’t… He doesn’t trust anyone, not really. But once he knows who you are, what makes you tick—the leash gets longer.”

Steve nods, slow, and then—and then the lift door slides open and they get in, Clint mushing the button for the ground floor, and the door slides to and—

Stops, just before it closes, a hand darting into the gap.

Slides open again and—it’s Rumlow. Brock Rumlow, of STRIKE Team Alpha, tac suit pants and a faded black T-shirt and the kinda sheepish look that is universal anywhere sliding lift doors exist.

“Sorry, guys,” he says, getting in, hitting the button for level three, and he makes eye contact with Clint for a second, nods, glances over Steve and away again, at the wall of the lift as they start going up and—

And then his gaze snaps back to Steve, eyes flare wide, recognition dropping on him like a half-tonne of cinder blocks.

“Uhh—” like it’s punched out of him, dumb animal shock, and then—“Rogers,” he says, and it’s half acknowledgement and half a question, which is—not unfair, seeing how Steve was a wanted fugitive maybe three hours ago.

Rumlow’s hand lifts, instinctive, comes up to his hip where he’d holster a gun, finds the fabric of his tac pants and no weapon, drifts down again.

“Rumlow,” Steve answers, bland as porridge, gives him a nod and then goes back to staring at the wall. He’s not gonna—Steve doesn’t know how Fury’s planning to do this whole trial period thing, what ops he’ll be working, who he’ll be working with. How Fury’s planning to spin the whole deal. So Steve’s not gonna start spilling chunks of his life story, not unless they’re need-to-know.

Rumlow—he’s solid, capable, a good team leader. But he doesn’t need to know.

Steve is aware of Rumlow’s stare, fixed on him like it’s nailed in place. Is it—is it just gonna be like this in SHIELD now, everywhere Steve goes? Folks staring at him like he’s the mermaid at the Coney Island freak show, like they’re waiting for him to pull a rabbit outta his hat or—wait.

Wait, that song is—

Rumlow’s song is acoustic guitar chords, the crunching mechanical slide of metal parts working against each other, like maybe inside an engine. Rhythmic. It’s—

Steve’s never walked around any SHIELD installation in his real body, not since the Times Square job after the Battle of New York. He only comes in Cap-shaped: when he goes on missions, when he debriefs after. Which means he’s headblind, deaf, he can’t hear the music, only…

Only he’ll swear to Christ he’s heard Rumlow’s song somewhere before.

Where the Hell would he have—not at the Triskelion. Not here, at the black site. Maybe—could it have been in New York? But—no. No, that can’t be it—it was _recent_ , Steve can feel it on the Goddamn tip of his brain.

He’s heard this song, recently.

Steve closes his eyes, breathes out, listens—rise and fall, punctuation of oiled metal over metal, and—and sense memory hits. Linoleum under his bony knees, and the smell of Bucky’s fear sweat, the dust-heat-metal and plastic stink of computers, massed computers, of—

The server room. The FBI server room.

_“Don’t let the Secretary hear you talking like that,”_ one of the cocksuckers in armour said, and—and Steve couldn’t see his face, couldn’t make out details past the bulky shapes of body armour and helmet but he could hear the guy, his voice, his song, and—

Rumlow was in the server room at the FBI building.

Which means—

Which means that Rumlow is working for Hydra.

Which means that Hydra is inside SHIELD.

Oh, you son of a _bitch_.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for violence and gore that is a fair jump up from canon-typical. Some Hydra goons have a very bad day. Hit up the end notes if you want to go in prepared.

_Ding_ of the lift, chiming, and the door slides open—ground floor, foyer, and Clint strides out, smooth and—Steve jolts, lurches forward and out after him on feet that have bled numb.

Jesus Christ, Holy Jesus Christ on a cracker, what the fuck—

Hydra, here. Inside SHIELD, inside—because it won’t just be Rumlow, it can’t just be Rumlow.

There is never just one rotten apple in the barrel.

Only question is how many there are, how deep the rot goes. Holy Mary, _Mother of fuck_ , what a shit show.

Steve turns, looks back—at the lift door sliding closed. Rumlow is still in there, thumbs hooked in the pockets of his tac pants and—and he’s looking up at the number above the door, not looking back at Steve. Thank fucking Christ, because only God knows what Steve’s face is doing right now—he can’t, he’s—

“Rogers?” Clint asks, and—

The door closes.

“You okay?” Clint asks, and Steve whirls about, and whatever Goddamn crazed look is on his face makes Clint blink and then go still, bright and clear and focused up like a laser.

“What’s—” he starts, and Steve turns and walks, marches across the empty foyer towards the glass front doors.

He’s—there are cameras here. Cameras everywhere. He’s gotta make this look good, gotta—

—and he’s diving deep, snatching up fistfuls of power and shoving them into place, weaving the spells fast and brutal and—

“Come on, man,” Clint is calling, and he’s following, effortless lope to keep up. “What the Hell?”

Steve stops dead, reaches back—like he’s signalling _move up_ , tactical hand sign—reaches back just as Clint puts the brakes on and stops right behind him. Catches Clint by the belt of his tac suit.

Drops the walking veil over the both of ‘em.

Throws the seeming forward, illusion of the two of ‘em walking forward and out the doors, smooth and easy. They’re arguing about where to get lunch, shooting shit back and forth, Thai versus pizza—it’s pretty robotic dialogue but that’s okay, only has to hold up to scrutiny for a few minutes, long enough to get away from SHIELD’s cameras.

The sliding doors whisper closed again, cuts off the patter of inane talk, Steve’s best impression of Clint’s voice complaining about anchovies on pizza.

Silence drops over the foyer like a dead weight.

Clint breaks it—“What the Hell was that?” he asks, voice coming thin as spider’s silk.

He hasn’t moved, frozen in place. Steve turns, keeps a hold of his belt, keeps ‘em attached to each other—keeps Clint under his veil.

“That was an illusion,” Steve says. “This is a veil. We’re hidden from sight, sound, for as long as you’re touching me.” He tugs at Clint’s shirt front, demonstrating.

“Okay, so let go,” Clint says, sweeps his forearm down in a block to break Steve’s hold, and Steve snakes his other hand around and grabs Clint by the pocket at his hip, and Clint—

He twists, puts his whole body a half-turn to his right, Steve’s left, reefs Steve off balance where he’s still hanging onto Clint’s pocket, clinging onto this veil with a Goddam vice grip inside his head.

Clint darts up with his left hand, fingers extended stiff like—he’s going for the pressure point in Steve’s shoulder, and Steve catches his hand on the fly and—

“Christ’s sake,” Steve hisses.

They’re still veiled, just. By the skin of Steve’s Goddamn teeth.

“What’s happening here, Rogers?” Clint asks—his face is less’n a foot from Steve’s right now, with how they’re grappling. He looks—he’s not alarmed. Studying, teeth half-bared, the same kinda cold pragmatism he gets when he’s in mission mode.

“I’m trying to _talk to you_ ,” Steve snarls back.

“Without an audience? You know I gotta tell Fury everything, man, come on—”

“Hawkeye,” Steve snaps, puts the full weight of his Captain America voice into it, and Clint jolts and focuses up like someone’s tapped him with a cattle prod. Steve takes a breath, says it out loud.

“SHIELD is compromised.”

Clint goes still, still as a sniper right before he takes his shot. He’s staring at Steve from a foot away, gaze darting from one of Steve’s eyes to the other and back again, studying, reading him for tells.

And then—“What do you know?” he rasps.

“Agent Rumlow is Hydra,” Steve says. “Which means there’s more—Hydra operate in cells, that’s why they’re so Goddamn hard to put down, the whole many heads thing—”

“What have you got on him?” Clint asks, and Steve lets go of where he’s hanging onto Clint’s fist, steps back and tugs at his belt, hauling until Clint follows. Leads the way over to the reception counter against the far wall—it’s a front, a set piece, computer monitor plugged into nothing. Steve’s never seen it actually manned.

Hauls ‘em both in behind the counter and drops into a crouch—it’s about the only spot in the foyer where the overlapping gaze of SHIELD’s security cameras won’t see them.

“I thought we were invisible, Harry Potter?” Clint says, easing his way down into a squat.

“We are,” Steve says. “And veils can fall apart at the drop of a Goddamn hat, so you still gotta be smart. I haven’t made it two years operating directly under SHIELD’s nose without inventing all new kinds of paranoid.”

“Tell me about Rumlow,” Clint says, rests his forearms on his thighs and settles in, his gaze bright and clear and focussed as a white-tailed eagle. As a hawk.

This is gonna be—oh, Jesus. This is awkward. “I ran into him earlier this week,” Steve says. “In the J. Edgar Hoover building.”

“In the—” Clint starts, and then stops, closes his eyes like he’s in pain and—“Aw, shit. So you did the FBI data leak.”

And it is really Goddamn interesting that Fury didn't tell Clint that. “I did the FBI leak,” Steve says.

“You know I gotta tell Fury that, too?” Clint asks, and—

“Fury knows,” Steve answers. “The Goddamn Feds caught me on camera in my real body and some Goddamn kitten-heel pumps. Point is, I was in the FBI server room when a bunch of Hydra goons came through to search the place, and Rumlow was one of ‘em. He’s dirty.”

Clint is silent for a long moment, studying Steve’s face like he’s counting at the cellular level, jaw working. Then—“Why are you only saying something now?”

“Because I didn’t know it was him until just now,” Steve says, and—

Christ.

His whole Goddamn testimony is based on his _sorcery_ , on that inner sense he has—of the music, of the songs of people and places and things and beings and—and it’s a sense humans don’t have, so—

How in the fuck to explain this.

“I didn’t see his face,” Steve begins. “But I—part of the package deal of the, uh, the other’n human half of my ancestry. I have some extra senses. It’s what lets me work sorcery, the way I do. And people—all people, everyone—they have a—uh. A signature. It’s unique. I heard it, felt it, coming offa one of the creeps in the FBI server room, and I felt it again just now.”

Clint is quiet again, processing that, his spy’s poker face clamped into place hard.

“So,” he says, after a minute. “You don’t have proof. You’ve got ESP.”

Jesus Christ on a cracker. “It’s _not ESP_ ,” Steve says—he’s not reading fuckin’ cards, not communing with the spirit of your dead Golden Retriever, he’s—

“I dunno,” Clint says, turning his hands palm up like he’s weighing the options. “It’s an extra sense, and you’re perceiving with it. Sounds like textbook ESP to me—“

“Barton,” Steve cuts in. “Please. Christ, I know it sounds Goddamn ridiculous. I’ll—I’ll find a way to prove this,” and then Steve stops, takes a breath, and in the heartbeat of silence he can hear Clint’s song.

Clint’s song is—there’s the hum of wind, of air moving in very high places, cold claws against your skin and weight like thumbs pressed against your ear drums. Weaving though, there’s the ripple of—it’s hooves moving over dirt, the rhythmic clatter hitting soil and huff of horses breathing and—high notes of whistling, like a flute or a pipe, sharp and fine as an arrowhead.

And under it all, in the core of the song there’s—Steve can just make it out. Laughter—children’s voices, wordless, laughing.

And it’s kind of—dulled, to one side. The song—he’s hearing it more in one ear than the other, like—

“Are you deaf in one ear?” Steve asks.

“That’s in my file, man,” Clint answers. “You need to do better than that.”

“There’s—” Steve stops, cocks his head, listens. “Your signature. Your song. It’s your soul, it’s—I can hear horses?”

“In my file,” Clint drawls, his expression levelling out flat and—

“Children,” Steve says, and Clint jolts like he’s licked one of Natasha’s stingers. “I can—there’s two voices. A boy and a girl. Did you have a sister?”

Clint is frozen, and his mouth hasn’t shifted but he’s gone tight around the jaw, wild around the eyes.

A heartbeat of silence, two, three, and then—“If you’d read my file, you’d know I didn’t have a sister.”

“I haven’t read your file,” Steve says, solid as he can make it, like he’s swearing an oath on a stack of Bibles and his Mam’s gravestone all at once. “I’m getting this from you, man. With my Goddamn ESP.”

Clint is silent, mouth shifting, blinking hard, processing, and then—“I don’t know how you found out about them, Rogers. But I’m giving you all of one warning to leave my people out of this.”

Shit, this is—Christ on a crutch. Steve’s stepped on a Goddamn land mine here.

“I didn’t find out anything about anyone, okay? I don’t even know what I’m hearing, what it means. I just—they must mean a Helluva lot to you, whoever they are. Because those threads are—they’re right through the centre of you.”

Clint blinks, blinks again, shudders like—like some awful tension is lifting off all at once, sloughing off like dirty tissue from a wound bed. He lifts his hands, covers his face, rubs at his eyes, his hairline, shaking, mouth pulling down.

“Shit,” he says at last, rasping like he’s chewing glass, and then, “ _Shit_. Okay. Jesus Christ, I believe you.” He rubs at his face again.

Steve has never seen him shaken this bad before. Whoever those kids are—

Clint drops his hands again. He’s pale, biting at the inside of his mouth, but getting it together. “I believe you. Which means—I buy it. Rumlow is dirty.”

_Ave Maria, gratia plena_ —Steve’s out the other side of the minefield. And nobody got stabbed, and Clint is on board, so now—

“Detroit,” Clint says, and rubs at his mouth with blunt fingertips. Steve blinks, folds his right hand into a fist to break the press of thumb to fingertip, like he’s counting off the decades of a rosary.

“The Hammer factory, the weapons,” Clint says, and Steve’s nodding—he follows, so far—“Nat talked to the mercenaries. Got the story outta them. They never knew for sure who had hired them—it was all done with cat’s paws, wheels within wheels—but they were paid half upfront so they could buy the trucks and shit. The money—Nat followed the trail back—the money came from SHIELD.”

From SHIELD—Holy Mary, Mother of God—

“Do we know who?” Steve asks, blurts out like blood from a torn artery, chest clamping like his heart is turning itself out like the fingers of a glove.

Clint shakes his head, clipped and tight. “Gotta be Level Nine or above, to move that kinda money without a whole lotta awkward questions. Not a big suspect pool.”

Jesus fucking Christ.

“So we don’t who else is in on this,” Steve says. “But we know it goes all the way to the top.”

“ _Shit,_ ” Clint says again, and then—“Hydra. Hydra, right in the middle of—I gotta read Fury in on this. We need to clean house, yesterday. We know Rumlow is dirty—we grab him, squeeze him, make him talk.”

He’s pulling out his cellphone, thumbing into the contacts, dialling—

“Delta sunrise protocol. Get me Foxtrot, now.”

*******

Foxtrot is Director Fury. And Director Fury isn’t answering his phone.

Fury isn’t answering his phone, and then Hill isn’t answering her phone, and then—and then Clint tries Natasha and gets the same, radio silence—

“What the Hell,” Clint grinds out, mashing at his phone to end another call, robot voice of Natasha’s burner phone message bank cutting off to silence. “Everyone gonna drop off the grid at the same time, seems fine. Not at all concerning.” He drops his hands to hang between his knees again, leans deeper back against the counter, looks over at Steve.

“Gimme some good news, man. Where’s Rumlow?”

Steve—twitches. Shudders, muscle and organ and bone heaving and quivering and—he’s coming back, coming back in, hauling all the scattered threads of himself back in and in, into his meat suit, back from the corners of the building, the whole complex. Left just enough of himself here to hold their veils together and keep eyes on Clint, sent the rest of himself off scouting, scanning, on the hunt—

Takes a hot second to get his tongue and mouth back online, muscles of his soft palate and vocal cords, fitting together the physical puzzle pieces with the parts of his brain that do the whole _words_ thing, and then—“He’s gone,” Steve slurs.

“He’s what now,” Clint drawls, flat as a frying pan, free hand twitching into a fist.

“He’s gone,” Steve spits, working his jaw, curling and opening his hands, life returning to his meat and potatoes like blood surging back into a pinched-numb limb.

He’s searched the complex from top to bottom—sixth floor up in the air, where there are still shards of bulletproof glass stuck in the carpet and fat stripes of Steve’s blood running down the wall of that one office. Empty, nobody home.

And on through, down and down—whole middle of the building is equipped for combat training, urban warfare, building shells and winding internal corridors set up for war games. There’s a STRIKE team in one of the locker rooms, getting geared up for a simulation, lotta talking shit about beating some guy’s score—no Rumlow.

Down and down—command centre, a handful of junior analysts still trawling through the FBI data dump—and carpark, below ground, down and—there’s an armoury on B2, arms and ammunition, a couple fellas in there stacking crates of materiel but not—and then B3, and Bucky, his guards, some other random schmucks in the other cells.

Guards, agents, scattered through the complex. Which—makes sense. It’s a Sunday, and Fury’s just stood down the active search for a fugitive. Lotta people probably cleared out, went home, gonna snatch some sleep or time with families before they gotta get back to the grindstone.

So it’s just a skeleton staff, holding down the fort out here.

And Brock Rumlow ain’t one of them.

Rumlow is gone. Walked out another exit while Steve and Clint were Goddamn armwrestling in the foyer. For _fuck’s sakes_.

“What the—” Clint trails into a grinding snarl, hits his head three times against the counter behind him, stops—“Coulson,” he says. “I’m gonna try Coulson.”

Steve catches his hand as Clint goes to lift the phone. “You sure about that? Sure he’s not—”

Steve stops, works his jaw—feels like a worm. Feels like the lowest kinda scum, but he’s gotta be sure, he’s gotta—“Sure he’s not one of them?”

Clint blinks, gives a tiny shake of his head like he’s gotta knock something loose in there. A couple long, silent seconds, and then—“I trust Phil Coulson with my life.”

“And I trusted Brock Rumlow with mine,” Steve replies—which is the truth. God’s own truth. “For most of the last two years. He’s _saved_ my life, on a couple ops. I’ve saved his. Being a treacherous shit-stain only works if the other guy doesn’t call it.”

And Mother Mary, it—it stings some. Pricks his pride, knowing that—that he didn’t fuckin’ see this coming.

Steve learned how to lie, how to read truth and falsehood in a man’s face, from the actual fuckin’ Norse God of trickery. And he wasn’t looking, wasn’t paying attention, was so busy working his own long con inside SHIELD that he didn’t even notice—

_Trust is the poisoned cup offered with a smile._ Trust is wilful blindness. Stupid, Goddamn stupid—how long?

How long has Rumlow been—was he Hydra from the start? Was he Hydra when they did the Luxembourg op—or in Dakar, that time Steve saw the sniper half a half-second before he fired, hauled Rumlow down and covered them both with his shield until Team Two could flank and put the guy down, close enough to smell the Goddamn garlic on Rumlow’s breath, to hear the minute hiccuping flutter in his heartbeat every time there came the crack of gunfire, mud and stone under their asses and the sunlight dropping like a hammer from overhead and—

“I trust Phil Coulson with my family’s lives,” Clint says. He’s making eye contact, clear and deliberate, laying himself open to be read like a book.

Shit, that’s—okay. That’s the kind of endorsement you can take to the bank. That’s solid as steel, solid as adamantium, and—

A _family_. Jesus, no wonder—the _kids_. No fuckin’ wonder he was ready to rip Steve’s Goddamn face off.

“Okay,” Steve says, blinking and looking away—too much that’s real there, in the cast of Clint’s face, the lines around his eyes. Too much vulnerability, and Steve can’t return the favour. Christ, he’s still got a seeming over his fuckin’ eyeballs. “Okay, so call Coulson.”

Clint calls Coulson.

Coulson doesn’t answer the phone.

Clint tries again, tries three more times—message bank, polite robot voice instructing him to leave a message after the tone or—

“Goddamnit,” Clint snarls out, stabbing at the call end button with a callused fingertip and slamming his head back against the desk again.

Coulson, Natasha, Fury, Hill. They’ve all gone dark in the last couple hours, which is—not good. Fucked beyond all recognition.

Hydra are here, Hydra are inside SHIELD, and—

“Okay, screw this, “ Clint says. “All our people are falling off the radar. Mean’s something’s happening. We need to get back to the Triskelion.”

“Yeah,” Steve agrees. If he were gonna—you wanna take down an organisation, take the head off the snake. Surgical strikes against leadership, right before the next big push. He’s played this game, done this shit, way the Hell back in the Forties, key personnel right across the European theatre.

Difference is, SHIELD doesn’t realise they’re at war.

Maybe—maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s a coincidence they’ve all dropped off the playing field at once. But if it’s not just a wacky coincidence—they need to get back to the Triskelion, need to get eyes on this Goddamn mess, stem the bleed before it’s terminal.

Only thing is—“You go now,” Steve says. “Get over there, find out what’s going on. I’m not gonna leave Bucky behind.”

“You’re what now?” Clint replies, the question coming through half-gritted teeth.

“I’m not leaving Bucky,” Steve says, and he’s using his Cap voice again, says it like it’s a spell and if he just makes it solid enough the universe is gonna have to go along with him. “Not stuck in an airtight box, knowing that Goddamn Hydra are here, falling out of the woodwork.”

“What are you gonna do, sit down there brooding while the rest of the world goes to shit up here?”

“I figured I’d get him out of the box,” Steve says. “And then go clean up the shit.”

Clint gapes, mouth working like a fish for a second, and then—“There is zero chance that anybody’s gonna authorise that.”

“I don’t need anybody’s authorisation,” Steve grinds out, and then Clint is sucking in a breath to respond and Steve barrels over, keeps going—

“They’re _torturing him_. I ain’t—I don’t have proof but I know it, okay? I caught them using sense dep on Tuesday. Christ only knows what other nightmare shit has gone on when I haven’t been here.”

Clint closes his mouth again, shifts back, brow down and eyes closing like he’s in pain, and Steve leans in, goes for the kill—“Five days ago he was speaking in sentences, fighting fit and alert, and now he’s catatonic, and he’s not eating, not sleeping. Hydra had him for a _decade_ , hurt him for a decade. They’ve still got him now, Clint. I’m _not leaving him_.”

And fuck, Steve has gotta be the biggest piece of shit on God’s green Earth. He gave Bucky back to Hydra, took his hands off the steering wheel, left him there to get chewed up and spat out again. Too fuckin’ stupid and complacent to recognise the scars of fucking _torture_ right in front of his face.

Too late to walk it back. But now he knows—now he knows, and—

“If you’re wrong, you’re freeing Hydra’s best asset,” Clint says.

“I have been wrong more’n you’ve had hot dinners,” Steve says. “But I am not wrong about this. I know that dumb asshole, better than anyone alive. He is not Hydra’s man. _Compliance_ ain’t loyalty.”

Clint’s bunching his eyebrows, lips pulling thin and flat, and—“Natasha,” Steve says. Complete sentence, full stop, and Clint gets it immediately, rocks back on his heels, blows a breath out through pursed lips.

Natasha Romanov is the living, walking, breathing example of the distance between compliance and loyalty. Of what happens when the conditions of compliance fall away. Of what you can become, when you get free.

And Clint had a front-row seat, watching her do it.

“If you don’t—I’m not expecting you to help me,” Steve says, and—

—and he only just chokes back the other half of that sentence: _I’ve done this before, I can do it again_.

“Go ahead to the Triskelion; find Fury, or Hill, or somebody. Start nailing Hydra to the wall. But I’m pulling Bucky outta there. I left him behind once and it was the single biggest mistake I’ve made in ninety-seven years. Hydra are here, and I won’t leave him with them, not twice.”

“God _damn_ ,” Clint growls, and then, “I bet you make speeches when you’re buying milk at the corner store, huh? Like it just rolls outta you.”

“Barton,” Steve growls, and—

“Keep your yoga tights on, Rogers,” Clint says. “Obviously, we’re gonna jailbreak the brainwashed assassin. Any chance you’re right, I’m not leaving the guy behind enemy lines. But we’re doing this my way.”

*******

There’s a hidden stairwell access to the lower floors.

“Of course there are stairs, Rogers,” Clint says, leading the way to the back of the building, anonymous corridors in white and grey, brass number plates on the doors they’re passing. “Fire code. They’re just super-secret stairs, because we’re spies.”

Round a corner in the corridor and—there’s a long row of anonymous office spaces, frosted glass doors and desks and computers, sun-starved potted plants, filing cabinets, could be any corporate complex in the continental United States.

Fourth door along—same frosted glass, generic desk and PC and bulletin board visible on the other side—and Clint stops, waves his SHIELD ID at the door handle. The hidden card reader beeps, and there’s the low _thunk_ of magnetic locks disengaging, Clint shoving through the door into—

Into a concrete stairwell, boring down and around into the guts of the earth, bald fluorescent lighting overhead.

“Huh,” Steve says—glances back at the non-existent office, still outlined in the frosted glass—and then Clint’s moving ahead and Steve follows, hard on his heels, fingers still tucked through Clint’s belt—keeping them linked, keeping them veiled.

Down the stairs. Levels in black paint on the walls as they go down—B1, handbags, ladies lingerie—

“One of his guards is gonna be Hydra,” Clint says, pulling a gun from his thigh holster and checking the chamber, the magazine, the safety.

“How do you figure?” Steve asks.

“In case the Soldier ever gets his head together enough to start spilling Hydra intel. They’ve gotta have one of their own posted on his detail round the clock, shut him down if he starts talking.” They’re coming to the bottom of the stairwell now, rounding to—it’s a dead end at the bottom, wall high and featureless, smooth, and Clint waves his ID card at the wall, left hand corner, hip height—

It lights up, cool white light. Beeps, satisfied—another hidden card reader. The door swings open, silent and smooth as greased vibranium.

“What if they’re both Hydra?” Steve asks, follows Clint out into—the hidden door spills out into the central corridor, just down past the bathroom. Bear left and head for Bucky’s cell.

“Then we’re in deeper shit than I thought,” Clint answers, rolling his neck—Steve can hear the _pop_ of vertebrae shifting. “But I’m trying to be an optimist, here.”

“You got a strategy for working out who’s who?” Steve asks, and—they’re almost at the end of the corridor, almost at the doorway into the monitoring room, and—

“I figure it’s gonna be the one who looks real guilty when I do _this_ ,” Clint says, and then he takes an extra step and pulls away, out of Steve’s hand, Steve’s veil. Walks unveiled into the room and—

It’s still Sitwell and Tan, sat in their chairs and facing front, watching the screens. Bucky is sitting up on the bed, one hand in the other and elbows on his knees and bare feet on the floor, folded forward, greasy hair a tangled curtain over his face.

“Hey guys,” Clint says, faux-bright, gun held down at his side. “Fun game, finish this sentence. _Cut off one head_ and?”

“What?” Tan asks, looking—confused, annoyed, casts half an eye at Clint but she’s on the job, giving most of her attention to the screens in front of her, and Sitwell—

Sitwell blanches grey, claws his way up from his seat and back, moving clumsy and fast enough to shove his freakin’ office wheelie chair halfway across the room.

“Oh shit,” Sitwell says, words stumbling out blurry like a drunk after midnight, grabbing for the sidearm holstered under his jacket and—

Clint lifts the gun and shoots him in the head, neat and clean, dead-on midline between the eyes.

The gunshot is—this is a small-ass Goddamn room: it’s deafening, howl of white noise in Steve’s ears, and past it he can just hear Tan’s yelp, pure animal shock spilling out of her, and Clint levels the gun at her centre mass, calm and smooth and practiced as an athlete, a dancer. His hand is steady like it’s carved from granite.

Sitwell is down, he’s on the floor and—there’s no blood. No stink of piss and iron and cooked brain tissue, he’s—there’s a maze of blue-grey lines tracking out from the centre of his forehead, crawling over his skin like veins, and he’s—frozen, stiff where he’s stretched out on the ground, like rigour mortis has already set in, only—

Only Steve can still hear his song.

Drops his veil and—“What the Hell is this?” Steve asks, staring, blinking.

“ICER rounds,” Clint says, like that means any Goddamn thing, and then—“Labs developed ‘em for non-lethal takedowns.”

“What the _fuck is this_?” Tan whisper-shrieks, hands up at her sides and—she’s frozen, twisted in her seat so she can keep eyes on everyone, her gaze darting from Clint to Steve to Sitwell and back again, mouth twisted with horror and fear and—

“He was Hydra,” Steve says. “They’re here, inside SHIELD. We’ve been infiltrated.”

Tan stares at him, wild-eyed, silent. Her mouth opens and closes again, and—

—and then her eyes dart to the side, accessing the archives, sorting through memories, making sense of inconsistencies, of missing pieces of the narrative, pieces of the puzzle that never fit together right.

Steve can see the moment she realises he’s telling the truth, the moment it hits her like a sack of hammers. Her eyes close, mouth pinches into a thin flat line. Hands, still up next to her head, close into fists.

“Son of a bitch,” she breathes.

Overhead, the lights flash over to red and an alarm begins to howl like a wounded muskox.

*******

“It’s locked down,” Tan says, half-shouting it to be heard over the blare of the alarm. “Emergency protocol. You’re gonna need Level Nine clearance to open that door.”

“Shit,” Clint spits, and—

“Okay, gimme a second,” Steve says, and steps back and puts his head down, breathes deep, pulls up threads of music and shoves the shapeshifting spell through and—

It hurts every time he shifts shape. Every time.

It’s easier if he can take it slow, ease it through, but it still hurts like a son of a bitch—and this time there’s the unique tearing pain in his left eye, like someone’s put an apple corer in his eye socket and is twisting it slow, and he’s grinding his teeth around a whining scream, pouring it on and on—

—more power, more sorcery, throwing gas on the fire because he needs this done _now_ —

Opens his eye. Tan and Clint are staring, wide-eyed and a good two shades paler’n they were a minute ago.

“Christ _Almighty_ ,” Steve grinds out, and it’s Nick Fury’s voice that spills out of him. Jesus, but his feet hurt in these boots.

“ _Shapeshifter_ ,” Clint breathes, voice coming thin as an unloved ghost. “Right.”

“Where’s the Goddamn access?” Steve snarls.

Tan lifts a shaking hand and mutely points at an access panel next to the cell door.

Steve lurches over, palms it open, blinks his right eye at the reader.

“ _Director override, please confirm?_ ” A soothing electronic voice asks, sweet as apple butter, and Steve looks around wildly because he’s got no fucking idea—

“His name,” Clint says, rasping like he’s just swallowed smoke. He blinks hard a couple times, tries again: “Surname, first name, initial, and you gotta confirm it.”

Steve turns back to the panel—“Fury, Nicholas J. Override confirm,” he says in Fury’s voice, in Fury’s body, the squirming awful feeling of being in the wrong shape crawling up from his belly and into his throat like he’s gonna puke, and—

The alarm cuts to silence. The doors slide open.

Steve lets out his breath, lets go of the spell, bounces back to his real shape so hard and fast it almost knocks him off his feet, strangled yowl of pain pouring outta his mouth and then—

Through, forward. Into the cell.

Bucky is up, jack-knifed up from the bed the very Goddamn second the door slid open, and his metal hand is folded into a fist, pale eyes wild and staring from between tangles of dark hair.

“Buck, with me,” Steve raps out, and Bucky blinks hard, jaw working, calibrating, eyes darting—“We’re gonna blow this pop stand,” Steve tells him, and Bucky’s eyes go flat and cold as a shark in bloodied water.

And then he moves.

In the control room, Clint is kneeling across Sitwell’s spine and hauling his frozen-rigid arms back and together so Tan can cuff ‘em together, fat glossy metal cuffs that look like they were engineered to hold someone much bigger. They’re talking low and fast—

“—people you trust,” Clint says. “And I mean people you really trust. Get together, get someplace with a door that locks, get armed, and hold it down until we find out what the Hell is going on here.”

“Question everything,” Steve throws in, hauls a spare hair tie out of his jacket pocket so he can knot his hair back again—came loose when he shifted shape. “Any orders you get from high up—ask questions, find out where they came from. We don’t know who’s Hydra but we know they’re somewhere right at the top of the tree.”

“Copy that,” Tan grunts, reefing at the cuffs to check ‘em, and then she looks up, sees Buck standing at Steve’s shoulder, stifles a flinch. Steve can see her collarbones lift, taking a deep breath—“Are you sure about this? About him?” she asks.

“More’n I’m sure of anything else,” Steve answers, and he’s telling her and he’s telling—Clint is studying the both of ‘em, Steve and Bucky, like they’re one of those Escher paintings that only start making sense when you turn something in your brain kinda side-on, like he’s only starting to really see them both now.

“Form up, fellas,” Steve says, hooking a finger in the pocket of his jacket and tugging at it. “We gotta move out.”

Clint grabs a handful of jacket. Buck takes a second—stares at both of ‘em like they’re crazy—and then he blinks hard, eyes going distant for a second. Grabs onto the fabric of Steve’s jacket like he’s grabbing onto a life preserver.

“Here goes nothin’,” Steve says, and then he sings up a veil and they move out.

*******

They’re halfway up the stairwell—lifts are are a no-go, locked down, lights flashing and alarms blaring—when Clint’s cellphone rings.

There’s a hiccuping half second where—Clint slows, fumbles, shoves his gun back in the thigh holster and hauls out his phone, and Steve’s gotta slow up sharp so he doesn’t pull away, move outta touching range, lose Clint outta the veil. And then—

“It’s Coulson,” Clint says, yelling to be heard past the howl of the alarm klaxons—it’s shattering loud in this Goddamn concrete box—and then he’s thumbing the phone and jamming it up to his ear and Steve moves out again.

Gotta keep moving. Gotta find a way out of this building before they close the trap.

Hauling ass up the stairwell—Clint and Buck hanging onto the back of his jacket, so close he can feel their radiant body heat on his back, feel their breath on the back of his head—

—and the alarm screams like a _bean sidhe_ , Godawful noise ricocheting around in the enclosed stairwell like shrapnel.

Clint is yelling into the phone—

“We’re compromised. _Hydra_ , it’s Hydra—shit, he can’t Goddamn hear me—“

—and then they’re at the top of the stairs and Steve snatches Clint’s ID from his hip pocket, swipes at the door until it _clunks_ unlocked and shoving out, into the corridor and—

The alarm cuts to dead silence. Quiet as a morgue after business hours.

The thud of the door locking closed again behind ‘em is loud as a gunshot.

“Well, that’s not ominous,” Steve says, and Clint yells into the phone—

“It’s Hydra. They’re _here_. SHIELD has been breached.”

He’s close enough that Steve can hear the heartbeat pause, and then Coulson’s voice through the speaker: “ _Say again, your last._ ” He sounds like someone’s just kicked him in the chest, like his breath is coming thin and at a Goddamn premium.

“It’s Hydra,” Clint says. “They’re here. Rumlow and Sitwell for sure, we don’t know who else. Fury, Hill and Romanov have all gone dark in the last two hours.”

Another heartbeat of silence over the phone, broken when—

“ _Zhelaniye_.”

Bucky flinches like he’s eaten the back of a hand, rasps in a breath. His hand locks into the fabric of Steve’s jacket, convulsively tight.

It’s—it’s come from overhead—a speaker. There’s a slim speaker set in the ceiling of the corridor.

_Zhelaniye_ —it’s Russian. Steve rattles through his brain, storehouse of pieces of Russian vocabulary—a wish? A desire?

What the Hell is _that_ supposed to mean?

“ _Rzhavyy_ ,” comes from the speaker overhead, and—

“ _No_ ,” Bucky says, and he sounds— _broken_ , like something big and highly vascular has just torn open in his centre mass.

Steve half-turns, looks—at Bucky, staring up at the speaker in the ceiling, wild-eyed and bleeding grey he’s so Goddamn pale. At Clint, staring at Buck like he’s a car crash happening in slow motion, some Godawful kinda compelling.

“I’m gonna call you back,” Clint says, and jams the phone back in his pocket, and—

“ _Semnadtsat_ ’,” the Goddamn ceiling voice says.

“ _No_ ,” Buck says again—the first words he’s spoken in over an hour. “No, _don’t_ ,” and then—

And then he lets go of Steve’s jacket. Claps both hands over his ears.

“ _Rassvet_ ,” comes from overhead, and—

And Buck’s _exposed_.

He’s outside Steve’s veil, he’s _visible_ —which means they’re on a damn short countdown now until someone responds, locks this corridor down or drops a half-tonne of shit on their heads. SHIELD, or Hydra, or both of the above.

Bucky staggers against the far wall, hands clamped over his ears, eyes closed like a child hiding from the wicked fairies under the bed. His _song_ is—welling, swelling, _shrieking_ —

“Buck, what’s—” Steve asks—like some kinda _fucking idiot_. Buck’s _outside the veil_ now, he won’t hear a Goddamn thing Steve’s saying, and—

“ _Pech’_ ,” come from overhead, from the wall speaker— _oven,_ Steve’s idiot brain translates, like that means anything.

Bucky flinches like a kicked dog and gasps, mouth falling open like there’s some Godawful pressure inside his skull and it’s gotta come out somewhere.

“Rogers, listen,” Clint says. “I’ve seen this before. When Nat first came in, she—” He’s shock-pale, nostrils flared—horror, disgust. “It’s—trigger words. Psychological programming.”

Jesus _fucking Christ_ —Steve hauls up a fistful of the fire of unmaking and flicks a hex at the speaker—sparks, a broken whine, and then silence—and from down the corridor, echoing: “ _Devyat’_.”

Son of a _bitch_. Shit, gotta—gotta fix this, gotta—

Steve reaches into his belly, reefs up a couple handfuls of power, stalks over to where Bucky is sagging against the wall like he’s bleeding out—

—feels the tug of Clint’s hand pulling free of his jacket at his back.

Moved too Goddamn fast.

Pete’s sake, now they’re _both_ outside the veil, visible, vulnerable.

And he’s gotta deal with this clusterfuck _one fuck at a time_ , so—he hauls up and stops dead in front of Bucky, hands up like he’s gonna grab the guy by the arms, the hands—and he doesn’t touch. Not yet.

His dumbass hindbrain is screaming _touch_ , screaming _grab on_ and assess for injuries, _fix this_ but—but Bucky’s coiled like a wounded animal. Grabbing him while being _fucking invisible_ has gotta be the dumbest possible thing to do right now—

“ _Dobroserdechnyy._ ”

Clint is coming over, following blind. “Rogers? You’re still here somewhere, right? Listen, I’ve gotta knock him out.”

“ _Vozvrashcheniye na rodinu_ ,” comes bouncing down the corridor, and—

“No,” Steve snaps—at Clint, at the Goddamn ceiling speakers, at SHIELD and Hydra and the whole incestuous shit storm of lies and—and then he reefs his sorcery out and through, weaves the spell fast and loose, slaps his hands to the sides of Bucky’s head.

Silencing veil.

The metal plates in Bucky’s skull—Steve anchors the veil there, on either side, wrapped around his head, one-way cone of silence.

Steve’s veil is disintegrating like cotton candy in the rain and Bucky’s recoiling, falling back against the wall and—

“ _Odin_ ,” the voice from the walls pronounces.

“ _Shit_ ,” Clint yelps, twitching from head to toe and heaving himself away as Steve appears outta nowhere and—

—and Bucky’s got his eyes open, staring, darting from Steve to Clint, up and down the corridor, hands still clasped over his ears, chest heaving with his breath and—

“ _Gruzovoy vagon.”_

“Steve—we have to KO him before they complete the trigger. They’ll sic him on us, make him kill himself—we’re out of options,” Clint is saying, low and urgent, watching Bucky like he’s a rabid dog, like he might bite any Goddamn moment.

“No, Clint, he won’t,” Steve says, and Buck’s eyes settle on Steve and—

“ _Soldat_?” comes over the speakers, and then silence, and in the silence—

That voice—that voice. Beyond the words, the fuckin’ nightmare of the words, how they’re dug like coils of razor wire into the meat of Bucky’s brain—beyond the words is the _voice_ , speaking ‘em.

Steve knows that Goddamn voice.

“That’s Alexander _fucking Pierce_ ,” Steve says, and it comes thick, clotted, snarling like a pack of wolves is spilling outta his mouth. There’s nothing human about how he sounds just now.

Alexander Pierce—the _Secretary._

_“Don’t let the Secretary hear you talking like that.”_

Pierce knows the magic words to flip the switch on Bucky’s Goddamn _psychological programming_. Which means Pierce is Hydra.

What the _fuck_.

“I got some function loss,” Bucky rasps into the awful silence, loud and toneless—can’t hear himself. “My hearing’s fucked.”

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. “I’m sorry, Buck,” Steve says, shaping the words real clear so Bucky can follow, read his lips. There’s no time for a more elegant Goddamn solution, not when they’re in mid-bug out, standing around exposed and unveiled in a corridor like a bunch of assholes.

“Okay, yeah. That works,” Clint says, and—

Howl of music welling, incoming, collision of songs pulling together and—far end of the corridor, a STRIKE team spilling into the space, rifles up, solid wall of black armour and boots and guns levelled in their direction.

“Oh man,” Clint says, and—

They got here—fast. Must be the guys from the training level; there wasn’t anyone else on site, close enough to respond.

“ _Stand down and surrender the Soldier now_ ,” one of the STRIKE guys blares—not a voice he recognises, a team he hasn’t worked with before.

Steve squares up, rocks his head side to side to click one of the vertebra in his neck into place. Crooks his fingers and pulls up some power, just enough to coil around his fingers, enough to feel that thrum of electricity and heat and life. “Hey, fellas,” he calls down the corridor.

Ten rifles, pointed in his direction. Their helmets are all equipped for thermal imaging—fuckin’ figures.

“Invisibility cloak?” Clint breathes, reaching back to find the butt of the gun holstered at his thigh.

“Thermal imaging,” Steve replies, crooking his hands into conjuring gestures and reaching again, deeper, drawing thick snakes of fire up from the well in his pelvis, into his chest, arms—

“Hey, so. I figure there’s one of two things happening here,” Clint shouts. “One is: you’re Hydra. You’re Hydra agents. And you’re gonna regret that, in maybe, like, two minutes. Or, could be you’re SHIELD, really SHIELD. And I’ve got some bad news about this whole Hydra business, guys, you might wanna sit down.”

“ _Stand down now, final warning_ ,” some STRIKE mook yells again.

Christ’s sake. Okay, _fuck_ —fine. The hard way it is.

“Figures,” Clint says—hand on his gun, dropping his weight low, ready to move the second Steve calls it.

Bucky is—he’s squared up, shifting into a low stance, something heavy and predatory. There’s a mechanical whine, his arm recalibrating, metal plates shifting—he’s staring fixed at the STRIKE guys, wild-eyed. His human hand is trembling.

Here goes nothing—“Get the Hell outta my way,” Steve yells down the corridor.

And then he rolls his wrists, gives the spell its final twists, final shape—and he can _taste_ saltpetre, honing in on the scent and taste and feel of—scalding heat like he’s pushing his hands into boiling water, holding ‘em to the flame, _Jesus Christ_ —

—and hexes every firing mechanism he can reach.

“ _Final warning_ ,” Steve snarls, wolfish part of his brain bristling and teeth bared. Pulls the ceramic knife from his boot with one hand and makes a conjuring gesture with the other, pulling at the fire from his belly—more, more.

There’s a heartbeat of silence—and then a chorus of—triggers pulled, firing mechanisms crunching like a fork in the garbage disposal. A loud and smokey _pop_. One of the rifles falls to pieces in the guy’s hand—

Yeah, your guns don’t work like that anymore, assholes. Enjoy those rifle shaped paperweights.

And then—

Bucky _moves_ , explosive, more’n human quick forward, metal arm crooked up in front of his face and torso like a boxer’s block, like a shield, and then he’s on them, faster than blinking, driving his human fist into a guy’s neck and—

“ _Shit_ ,” Clint says, low and heartfelt, pulling his gun—it’s hexed, just the same as Hydra’s weapons, all the use of a Goddamn brick but he doesn’t know that yet, sorry pal—and melting against the wall.

The STRIKE guys are—half of ‘em are still pointing their rifles, trying to fire ‘em—one blows up in the guy’s hands, sharp bark of plastic and metal turning to shrapnel.

The other half have dropped their guns and pulled stun batons, orienting on Bucky, on the immediate threat.

He’s turning like a snake striking, snatching a baton out of the air with the metal hand and smashing the butt of it into the next guy’s face— _crack_ of the polymer helmet shattering—

Steve tears the power up and through his body, shaping it with a couple ugly twists of his hand, and then he winds up and pitches the working—

—there, right _there_ , that guy, half-turned—he’s facing Bucky, showing Steve his back.

Throws hardball, his best firestarter spell catching in midair like a tiny meteor, white flame soaring—

Landing square in the fella’s back, belt height, right where—the thing about STRIKE is, these guys are professionals. And they’re Goddamn proud of it too—the best of the best, and they know it, and—and they’re a well oiled machine because every fella knows where the other guys are, and their rig is set up identical.

They all carry their rifles on the same brand of strap and they all carry the same spare sidearm in identical holsters and they all have flash bangs on their belts, around the back, easy to tug free and throw—

The tiny fireball lands, cleanly on the guy’s belt, and there’s a breathless pause—Bucky clotheslines some mook with the metal arm, Clint’s somewhere behind Steve cussing because his gun is jammed and then—

And then a flash bang catches fire and the corridor whites out.

Steve’s got his eyes clamped shut, arms up to protect his ears, and it’s still—it’s like a shell’s landed ten feet away, the world burning phosphorous white and etched with red at the corners, roar of the blast abrupt as a slap to the face and then gone and—

Steve opens his eyes.

His ears are shot to _shit_ , mindless whining cutting across everything, but his eyes are okay—and he’s the one-eyed man in the land of the blind.

There are six STRIKE guys still on their feet, and four of ‘em are staggering, clutching at their eyes. Other two—musta been looking the other way at the right moment—are bleary but starting to focus up again, looking at Steve, at Bucky—

Bucky’s blinded. Eyes half-closed and—and he’s still fuckin’ deaf, Steve’s veil wrapped around his head.

And he hasn’t stopped moving, arm darting out—finds the next guy by touch and snarls his metal fingers into the front of the fella’s tac gear and hauls him into range of his other fist—swinging, textbook punch, taking him down.

“Son of a—” Clint yells, and Steve spares a heartbeat to look back—he’s blinded too, smearing at his streaming eyes with the heel of his palm, still holding his jammed gun.

Great—Steve’s blinded the marksman.

Solid plan, well executed—fuckin’ _fine_.

Steve turns the knife in his grip, sips in a quick breath, and runs at the enemy.

_Five_ guys still standing, only two of ‘em with working eyes, and both of ‘em are moving at Bucky, stun batons up—

—fuck that, _fuck all of that_ —

—and Steve’s almost on them and the front guy’s turning to meet him, turning to respond and—

Steve taps the piercing at the bottom of his sternum, pulls the quick-deploy veil out like a rabbit outta the hat, goes dark in mid stride and—and drops low, under the guy’s swing, slams shoulder first into his gut and brings the knife up and through and—

—and Steve’s real Goddamn familiar with the armour the STRIKE guys wear, as familiar as he is with their rig and their weapons.

They’ve got body armour over the chest and torso. Helmets. Their suits are made with bulletproof fibres woven through, same kinda stuff Howard Stark was working on when he made Steve’s uniform way the Hell back in the War.

Bulletproof ain’t the same as impermeable.

Steve punches the blade into the guy’s groin, sawing and slicing in and in—up and under the armour—awful grinding scrape of the knife tip hitting the bone of his pelvis and Steve shifts angle and shoves deeper, to the hilt.

Reefs the blade out again with a fat gout of blood, deep crimson and arterial, and the guy’s sagging back, staggering, falling—

Steve straightens up and reorients and—

The other STRIKE asshole has his stun baton shoved into Bucky’s gut—Buck’s gone to one knee, quaking with the voltage running into his flesh, his bones, feral scream grinding out from between gritted teeth and Steve’s moving, throwing himself forward again and—

Bucky heaves, throws his metal arm up—up the length of the baton—grabs the guy’s hand and _squeezes_ , clamps down to slice metal through Kevlar fibres and tendons and bones and the guy _howls_ , baton sliding out of the ruin of his hand—

And Bucky’s up again, smooth and fluid, sightless eyes wild between the tattered strands of his hair as he grabs the guy by the throat with his meat hand, brings the metal hand up and finds his face, mouth, eyes.

Punches a metal finger and thumb in each Goddamn hole—like he’s picking up a bowling ball—Godawful wet sound of eyeballs bursting and the guy’s broken gurgling scream and the mechanical purr of the works in Bucky’s arm gearing up and he’s shoving, _squeezing_ and—

Crunch of bone and cartilage giving way as the middle of the guy’s face collapses like rotting fruit and his scream cuts to a choked off silence and Bucky drops him like a wet sack of shit.

_Fuck_.

Steve just—what the _Hell_ , Jesus _fucking Christ._

Gotta keep moving.

Steve bends and scoops up a stun baton and tags the nearest asshole still standing. He drops, twitching convulsively—eight down, two to go, both of ‘em still blind as bats—they’re staggering, falling back, trying to find cover against the walls, batons up, defensive.

Taking ‘em down is shooting fish in a barrel—one, two, down.

Done.

Ten bodies on the floor—a couple of ‘em still twitching, one moaning, low and broken, clutching at his shattered jaw and trying to roll over.

Buck stands in the middle of ‘em, weight low and head cocked, blind eyes staring fixed at nothing, still as a hunting cat in the heartbeat pause before she springs.

“Rogers?” Clint calls, breaks the ringing silence. Steve looks back and—he’s still standing against a wall, blinking furiously. “We okay? What did I miss?”

“Party’s over,” Steve says—and they’ve gotta get moving again before the next lot of cannon fodder get to their position.

Bucky—he’s still deaf, gentle hum of the veil singing offa him.

Steve finds the thread of the silencing spell where he’s still hanging onto it in the back of his head, tugs until he feels it unravel.

“Stand down, Buck, we’re okay,” Steve calls—and Steve might just be a fuckin’ lunatic but he’s not stupid enough to get inside range of those arms until—until Bucky relaxes, uncoils, face turning in Steve’s direction.

“ _Tak tochno_ ,” Bucky rasps. There’s blood and—and that clear stuff, that’s brain fluid—dripping from the fingers of his metal hand.

Jesus Christ on a crutch.

Gotta—gotta keep moving. Gotta just stick this whole nightmare onto the bike rack to look at later.

“With me, guys, come on,” Steve says, and then he gets ‘em formed up and latched on again, handfuls of Natasha’s jacket, and conjures up another walking veil to get them outta there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Violence / gore / body horror warning for this chapter: Bucky crushes a Hydra operative's face with his metal hand. It's described in fairly gruesome detail. If you'd rather skip over that chunk of text, you're not going to miss anything plot-essential, trust me.
> 
> Leave off reading at: "Bucky’s up again, smooth and fluid, sightless eyes wild between the tattered strands of his hair as he grabs the guy..."
> 
> You can pick up safely again at: "Steve bends and scoops up a stun baton..." which should be about six paragraph breaks later.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: police (or people who appear to be police, anyway) violence against a BIPOC character in this chapter. Given that's a scenario that happens literally every damn day, I figure it might be tender to read for some folks. Jump ahead to the end notes for spoilers if you'd rather go in informed.
> 
> Also: again, a massive thank you to all the lovely humans (and other-than-humans--I don't judge) who are commenting and kudos-ing and reccing. You are all magnificent beings of light (or darkness, if you'd rather--again, no judgement) and I lay at your feet, unworthy. I promise that one day I will get my shit together enough to actually reply to comments, but at the minute I'm entirely using my writing time for, uhh, *checks notes* --writing.
> 
> Which is the other thing--I promised y'all weekly updates, which has proven to be a lie. Past-me is a lying cad. Good news is that it's because my editing keeps being interrupted by writing new material. Arc five is in the works.
> 
> Yes, there's going to be an arc five. This is where I live, now.
> 
> xoxo

In the parking garage, they veil-walk straight past the barbershop quartet of security goons that are patrolling between the cars, rifles trained at the ground—they’re on high alert, pissed off ants spilling out to defend the nest. God only knows if they’re—if they’re Hydra, or SHIELD, actually SHIELD and getting bad orders from some traitorous shit-stain further up the chain of command.

Like, for a wild example, Alexander fuckin’ Pierce. Who is Secretary of the World Security Council, and also fuckin’ Hydra, because _fuck Steve’s life_.

“My rental’s over there,” Clint says, pointing at the far corner—he’s speaking low, carrying his weight low, instinctive urge to make himself small, to hide, and never mind that Steve’s veil means he could theoretically perform a musical number the whole way outta here without alerting the guards. He’s pointing at an anonymous-looking dark blue sedan, rental agency stickers in the back window and—

That’s—as Steve turns to look, it’s—over there. Far end of the garage. That’s Steve’s bike. “Hold up, fellas. Detour.”

Steve course-corrects, changes heading toward the bike—feels the twin tugs in the back of his jacket, Clint and Bucky both hanging on for grim death back there. Gotta stay touching, stay inside Steve’s veil.

He feels like a mother duck that somehow adopted a couple Rottweiler pups, and now they’re full grown and four times his Goddamn size but still following him around, close as breathing.

The’ve both got their eyesight back, more or less, after gettin’ their retinas fuckin’ cauterised by the flash bang in the STRIKE team fight. Both alert and eyes up, scanning for threats. Clint has been running a low-voiced commentary, which way to go, how to get around that checkpoint, this secured door.

Bucky is silent as the morgue, hasn’t said a word since—since the corridor.

Since—“ _Tak tochno_ ,” with water-pale cerebral fluid dripping thickly from his metal fingers.

Jesus H. Particular Christ, that’s—shit. Focus up, man, come on.

The bike’s stashed outta the way, dimly lit corner, traffic cones dotted around it and ugly metal boots locked onto both of the wheels and—

The saddlebags are gone. Which Steve expected—SHIELD has had them for days while he was on the run, probably pulled ‘em apart down to the leather of the stitching by now, looking for any kinda evidence about who he really is, where he mighta gone. Here’s hoping they got a lotta joy out of analysing his year-old receipts from sandwich shops, or whatever other crap was in there.

Steve touches the seat—feels the hum of his _don’t-notice-me_ spell, faintly, through the leather.

Still there—which means intact, untouched. Which means they didn’t find it.

Steve feels for the catch under the edge of the seat, hooks his fingers, flips the hidden compartment open, hauls out the backpack inside. Clink and shift of metal on metal inside—knives, cash, another set of fake ID, a keyring with a bunch of blank keys and anchored spells on it.

Because Steve doesn’t sleep a whole lot, and his PTSD has PTSD, and it’s not paranoia if you really are wanted for questioning by Interpol.

“How the Hell did they miss that?” Clint asks. There’s an impatient note in his voice, the professional fella personally annoyed by incompetence, even when it benefits him.

“Spell,” Steve grunts, slinging a strap of the bag over one shoulder—keep his hands clear, open. Eases the compartment closed again and pats the seat, the saddle.

He can’t take the bike with. He’s—he’s lived with one foot out the door for the last two years, ready to cut and run at a Goddamn heartbeat, because he’s got too many secrets and any one of ‘em coming out could fuck him. So he doesn’t really let himself get attached to—stuff. But he likes his bike. His bike, his shield, the clothes on his back—

_Sorry, sweetheart._

Steve turns, looks back—at Clint’s rental car. At Clint and Bucky, hovering on his ass like they’ve been stitched there, Peter Pan’s shadow sewn to his flesh.

He’s got them. Got Bucky, out of that fuckin’ white box, buried in the sub-basement of the world, with Hydra agents controlling whether he ate or slept or bled or fuckin’ _breathed_.

The Lord taketh away, but the Lord giveth sometimes, too. Whatever the Hell happens next, whatever battles they’ve gotta fight—he’s got ‘em.

Over to Clint’s car.

Steve does a lap around the rental, slow, drawing up power from the well in his belly, dabbing a _don’t-notice-me_ veil over the paintwork, anchoring it into the metal of the bonnet, the side panels.

“What are we doing?” Clint hisses, square in Steve’s right ear, and Steve clamps down his immediate dumb urge to throw an elbow back into his face.

“Sorcery,” Steve grits out—holding, holding his walking veil together, holding the don’t-notice-me veil steady.

There is a SHIELD guard two car lengths away from them, actively looking for their three dumb asses. If Steve fumbles any of the bags of flaming dog shit that he’s juggling, they’ll be fucked.

And then another firefight, more casualties. Another roll of the Goddamn dice if everybody comes out alive. And maybe this time, these guys are SHIELD instead of Hydra.

He needs to keep it together.

Breathe in. Breathe out and—“Okay, Clint, grab what you need. _Don’t_ let go of me.”

Clint shoves the stun baton in his right hand into his armpit, fishes out the car keys from one of his pants pockets, unlocks the car’s trunk slow and careful like he’s opening the casing on a nuclear warhead.

Long metal case—he pops the clasp, opens it up. Clint’s bow is sitting in the top of the case, collapsed for transport, gleaming soft and matte and deadly.

“How’s my girl,” Clint croons, and then he’s dumping the baton into the trunk and scooping up weapons, one-handed. Bow and quiver over his shoulder, spare handgun into his thigh holster, big fuckin’ knife—

He stops, looks at the knife in his hand—it’s a clip-point blade, the steel dulled to almost black, maybe a Goddamn foot long with the handle—and then he flips the knife in his hand to hold it by the blade, offers the grip to Bucky.

Buck is—he’s watching the guard at the end of their row, gaze as cold and pitiless as a glacier slowly grinding the landscape to mud. He jolts when Clint levels the blade at him, focusing up hard and fast—Steve feels his jacket pull tight at the shoulder, where Bucky’s hand is clamped down into the fabric.

And then—frozen half-second, and then Buck reaches out with his metal hand, takes the knife.

Another moment of—they’re silent, Clint going back to grabbing shit outta the trunk—set of throwing knives, neatly folded inside a sheet of leather—and Bucky staring at him, fold in his brow like—confusion, some kinda old anger.

And then he nods, jaw working, goes back to keeping watch.

“Is this—” Steve asks, stops. Starts again—“Is this how professional murderers make friends? Because Natasha did the exact same thing to me.”

It was a gun, her Glock, not a knife. In the ugly yellow-and-beige box of Natasha’s basement safe house. But—but other’n that, the same damn script, like—

“Yeah? She learned it here first. Jesus, she was a prickly kid,” Clint says, gleam of his teeth in a half-grin, and then he’s closing the trunk and turning away. “Okay, ready.”

Driving outta here is off the menu—the in-ground spikes are up across every road and ramp, in or out. They schlep up the out-ramp, stepping over the spikes and weaving around the boom gate, get to the steel-mesh screen that’s dropped across the driveway exits and stop so Steve can conjure up another veil, a seeming, make it look like the screen is intact, whole.

And then Clint pulls some kinda tiny laser cutter out of one of his pockets, cuts them a hole in the mesh, and they climb through, awkward as fuck with two huge grown-ass men clinging to the back of Steve’s jacket and—

They’re out. Blue sky overhead, clouds smeared silver-grey along the western horizon. They made it out.

And there’s a Goddamn convoy of black SHIELD armoured vans pulling up, parking catty-corners across the front of the building. More STRIKE guys, more cannon fodder, spilling out and forming up—Mary, Mother of God.

Are they all Hydra? Or just—just getting bad orders?

Christ, he’d never have imagined in the Forties he’d miss the Hydra uniform. Made it real easy to see who the bad guys were.

“Keep moving,” Steve rasps—not gonna pick a fight with two STRIKE teams.

Not today, anyway.

This is—this is the game of great houses, and he needs to stay focused on the kings and queens, the playmakers. Not the pawns.

*******

They steal a car when they’re ten blocks away and Clint figures they’re outside of SHIELD’s monitoring perimeter, far enough to risk it. Steve hexes the traffic cam on the street corner, conjures up another veil, and then stands back and watches Bucky put his metal fist through the driver’s side window, climb in and hot-wire the car—

—and the brows-down look of concentration on his face, when he’s taking Clint’s knife to the wires below the dash, is so close to how he looked way the Hell back in the Thirties. In Brooklyn, working on cars in the Krevanek’s garage, and—Steve’s gotta take some steadying breaths to keep from laughing.

Or sobbing. Or something.

The whole operation takes less’n thirty seconds.

And then another messy thirty seconds of offloading weapons into the back seat and swapping in and out of seats and latching on and offa Steve’s jacket to stay veiled before—

They’re on the road, Clint driving, Buck on shotgun. Steve in the back with the weapons. With all of the weapons.

Between Steve’s stash and Clint’s personal armoury, they’ve probably got enough hardware to take down a small nation or two.

And no one is _touching_ Steve for like the first time in—it’s been—thirty minutes, or near enough. With—with someone _touching him_ , dead centre of his blind spot, right between the shoulder blades. Close enough to feel breath and body heat.

His hackles are going down, slow—the hackles in the wolf part of his brain.

He’s not used to—being touched. On his back. Where he can’t defend, can’t respond, and—it’s a lot.

Three blocks down and—

Clint twitches like a wasp’s stung him someplace sensitive. Lifts half-out of his seat and gropes for his ass, for his back pocket, hauls out his cellphone.

“Shit,” he mutters—it’s ringing, on silent, vibrating away furiously—looks at the display and then thumbs a button and throws it into the centre console. “This is Hawkeye.”

“ _Now you’re answering the phone_?” comes the reply, rapid fire patter over the speaker phone and—it’s Coulson. Agent Coulson. “ _What’s your sitrep_?”

“Just fought our way past a STRIKE team of Hydra plants,” Clint answers. “Coming home to roost now.”

“ _A whole STRIKE team_?” Coulson asks, sounding—sick. Like someone’s ripped the rug out from under his whole Goddamn life. “ _I’m working on getting into the secured personnel files for Rumlow and Sitwell. You’re saying a whole STRIKE team is dirty_?”

“STRIKE Echo,” Clint says, and—

“It goes all the way to the top,” Steve says, leaning closer to the console so the microphone catches him. “Coulson, the rot’s in deep. Alexander Pierce is Hydra. Fury, Hill and Natasha have all gone dark. I think they’re making a play for leadership, and I think it’s happening now.”

There’s a long moment of silence, which—right. Last time Coulson looked Steve in the eye, it was in the conference room at the Ivy City black site, right before the mousetrap snapped shut on Steve’s fuckin’ head.

“ _Rogers_ ,” Coulson says. “ _I should’ve guessed you’d be in the middle of this. What intel do you have on Pierce_?”

He’s not gonna take Steve at his word. Which—is a pretty good call, let’s be frank. Seeing how Steve has a long and established history of being a lying piece of shit, and was a fugitive from SHIELD right up until about three hours ago.

Not trusting Steve is a great call.

Only it’s _fucking inconvenient_ right now, with Hydra lining up to take control of a Goddamn global superpower.

Jesus Christ on a bike, what a shit show.

How to even begin explaining—

“Pierce knows the—the, uhh. The trigger words for the Soldier’s psychological programming. Only people with any business knowing those words would have been his handlers,” Steve says, darts a glance into the passenger seat, at Buck, who is—he’s checking out one of Clint’s handguns. Safety, chamber, magazine.

If it’s ruffling his feathers any—them talking about his trigger words, about his Hydra handlers—there’s nothing to show for it at skin surface. Bucky looks how he always looked, sniping, or prowling on silent feet deeper into a Hydra base, rifle tucked to his shoulder. Cold as pack ice, total concentration.

Silence from the other end of the phone for a beat, and then—“ _What happened that ended in Secretary Pierce using the Soldier’s activation codes_?”

“Yeah, we—uhh,” Clint says, and Steve can see him steeling himself, tensing shoulders and core like he’s bracing for impact. “We broke the Winter Soldier out of his isolation cell.”

“ _You did_ what?” comes back, immediate, raw like Coulson’s torn the words out through his sternum, and—

“They were torturing him,” Steve snarls. “I wasn’t gonna leave him in there when I knew for a Goddamn fact there are Hydra plants all through SHIELD like weevils through the flour. And they were Goddamn torturing him. It was my call.”

“And I backed his play,” Clint says. “So, that happened.”

“ _Where is the Winter Soldier now_?” Coulson asks, low and urgent.

“About two feet to my right,” Clint says. “Say _hey_ , man.”

Buck looks up from the HK P30 in his hand, glances over at Clint, at the cars around them, quick scan for threats. Half-turns his head so he can look back at Steve—quick, darting over his face like he’s checking out the weather and—and then he turns back, starts loading rounds into the gun.

“Yeah, not in a chatty mood,” Clint says, and—

“ _Hawk—_ Barton _. What the Hell were you thinking_?” Coulson asks.

“I was thinking this was gonna happen whether I jumped on board the crazy train or not, so—you know, might as well go for a ride,” Clint says. “I was thinking that Natasha told me that she buys Rogers’ story, and if Nat buys it, I’m gonna at least give him the time of day. And I was thinking it mighta hurt my feelings some if I’d been put in a Hulk-proof underground box after New York, that time Loki turned my brain inside out and I almost took a SHIELD Helicarrier out of the sky. But I didn’t get to stay in a Hulk-proof box. I got a commendation. So—you know. I’m paying it forward.”

Steve’s gotta close his eyes and just—just breathe for a minute. Clint is good people—he is _good fuckin’ people_ , clear-eyed and murderously professional, with a deep vein of real human decency running through his core.

And he’s thrown in with Steve. He’s thrown in with Bucky. Somehow, in spite of every Goddamn thing.

There’s another couple heartbeats of silence over the phone, Coulson turning all of that over, and then—“ _Rogers_ ,” he says.

Steve leans up closer to the phone again. “Yeah.”

“ _Barnes is—anything he does between now and Judgement Day. It’s on you. If Hydra get a hold of him and start steering again—if there’s a body count—it’s gonna come to land on you_.”

“It’s, what, five bodies and counting so far,” Clint says, mouth crooking up at one side, gallows humour grin, and takes a corner way too hard and fast.

“They were Hydra,” Steve says. “I’m not feeling a whole lotta remorse.”

He looks up, looks over at Buck. He’s finished loading the P30, is sitting with the gun in his meat hand resting against his thigh, and he’s watching Steve, close and narrow. Like he’s following a foreign language film by the subtitles and the skin of his teeth, and he can’t look away for more’n a second without losing chunks of plot.

“I’ll wear it,” Steve says, tells Coulson and Buck and Clint and the Goddamn world. “If this goes belly up, I’ll wear the consequences. Because if Hydra get a hold of him again, it’ll mean they’ve already gone through me.”

Silence again. Bucky looks away, back to studying the traffic outside, his posture in the seat rigid like he’s expecting a five-star general to appear any minute. Clint takes another corner too fast and then merges over a couple lanes, and someone a couple cars back leans on their horn and then—

“ _We’re gonna spring clean, find the moles inside SHIELD,_ ” Coulson says. “ _And then you and I are going to have a long chat, Captain Rogers_.”

Jesus wept, that sounds ominous.

“Copy that, Agent,” Steve says, and then he’s shifting, sitting back again. Drops his head against the backrest and his—his left hand hits the weapons bag on the seat. Feels a corner, feels—small rectangle.

That’s a phone. That’s—Christ, that’s right.

He’d started stashing his phone inside his go bag, right around the time Hydra shitheels started oozing up and outta government agencies all around, like mushrooms popping outta the soil after rain.

In case the shit hit the fan. Which it did, but not from the direction Steve was expecting, and—

He rips the bag open and gropes around—shoves a set of throwing knives to the side and—there. His cell phone.

It’s SHIELD issue. Which means Hydra issue. He’s got a Goddamn tracking device sitting in his lap. For Christ’s sake.

Steve hauls the phone out—screen lights up, briefly, with the movement. Two percent charge remaining, after four days on the lam. Can’t fault the battery life—and flips it, goes to lever the back open so he can pull the battery and SIM out, same operation he’s made enough times to—wait.

Wait, just—notifications on the screen. What was that—

It’s a message. It’s—

_If I get there and there’s pineapple on my pizza, we can’t be friends anymore_

What in the—from Sam. It’s from Sam Wilson, like half an hour ago. What’s—

“ _Romanov is radio silent because she’s on a mission_ ,” Coulson is saying. “ _Fury and Hill are in a meeting. I’m moving now, gonna get eyes on them both, confirm their status. We’re inside one of the most tightly secured buildings on the planet. We have time to figure this out, and then we clean house_ —”

“Who were they meeting?” Clint asks, head cocked towards the phone, listening close for the answer.

Silence for a beat—can hear the Triskelion’s freakin’ robot lift chiming out a saccharine _confirmed_ in the background, and then—“ _Alexander Pierce_ ,” Coulson says.

_Shit._

“He’s Hydra,” Steve snarls, looking up from his phone, passcode to unlock the damn thing half-entered, and—

“ _We have reason to believe Secretary Pierce may be Hydra,_ ” Coulson answers. “ _If we’re going to arrest the Secretary of the World Security Council, we need some actual evidence. Fly home to the roost, and we’ll figure this out_.”

Christ on a Goddamn cracker—of all the Goddamn times for Steve to have burned all his currency, all his trust, inside SHIELD and in the eyes of the world and—

He bites back a dumb wolfish growl, heaves himself back in his seat again. Looks back to—cellphone. Right. He’s still gotta—why is Sam texting him about fucking _pineapple,_ of all Goddamn things—

Taps his phone open. Twenty-three missed calls, eighty-six fucking emails, and a string of messages from Sam—

_Got that expensive ass craft beer with the pig for you_

_OMW, ETA like 40 minutes_

_If I get there and there’s pineapple on my pizza, we can’t be friends anymore_

“Oh, shit,” Steve blurts.

“What?” Clint barks, and the car lurches in the lane with how hard his hands spasm, hair-trigger reflexes—

“Is it Sunday?” Steve asks. “It’s Sunday. Jesus Christ.”

Sunday afternoon.

And Sam Wilson is en route to Steve’s apartment, for beer and pizza and talks about PTSD and long, heartfelt debriefs about the absolute crap-stain that is Steve’s life. And it’s all been planned and detailed on Steve’s cell phone.

His SHIELD issue cell phone, which is without fuckin’ doubt being monitored by SHIELD.

And by Hydra.

“Oh God, you gotta—” Steve fumbles the phone, almost drops it in the footwell, taps at Sam’s name on the screen with a fingertip that’s bled numb until he gets the option to place a call. Ringtone, purring, once, twice—

Cutting to silence.

Cell battery just lay down and died.

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Steve hisses, smothers his first idiot urge to bite the phone really hard and his second even dumber one to throw the damn thing—

“ _What_?” Clint repeats, louder, staring wild-eyed at Steve in the rear-view.

“I need you to drop me near Dupont,” Steve says.

*******

Clint pulls over in a loading zone on Massachusetts Ave—

—and it’s Steve and Bucky piling outta the car.

Steve meant it when he said he’d fuckin’ die before he lets Hydra get to Buck again. But if he’s gonna do that, he’s gotta be there. Gotta stick to Bucky like plastique to brick, and that means if Steve’s going after Sam—

Then so is Buck.

And it’s not safe, and Steve’s probably hauling him right back into a firefight, right back into the shit. There is no elegant fix here.

So they haul ass outta the car on Massachusetts Ave, veiled and invisible to everybody but one another, which means Clint’s yelling into empty space when he calls after them—

“Don’t die, okay?” His eyes dart, not sure where they oughta land—he’s talking past Steve’s left shoulder. “I’ll go hard burn for the Triskelion, find Coulson, get eyes on Pierce. Don’t die.”

And then the howl of tyres burning, Clint muscling his way back into the flow of traffic, and Steve tightens his fingers around the meat of Bucky’s wrist, takes a deep breath, looks up to get a look at his face, at—

Jesus Christ, was Buck always this tall? And—no, yeah—he was, more or less. The same kinda height he’s always been. He’s just bigger—lean and muscled as a wolf, not an ounce of spare anything to him, but in the War he’d been thinner, greyhound wiry kinda muscle. Probably not getting enough calories in, if his metabolism runs anything like Steve’s when he’s Cap-sized.

Buck is watching the street, watching the foot traffic, jaw working, eyes narrowed like he’s running equations in his head. He’s got Clint’s P30 in his left hand, the knife in his right. Torn papery SHIELD scrubs are streaked black with blood, most of it from other fellas. Loaded for bear.

Ready to—Jesus, does he have any idea what’s happening here? Got enough memories in a row to get any kinda context on what the fuck’s going on or—

Is he just following Steve?

Does—does he _know_ that he’s free?

Steve lets a breath out, long and slow and controlled, and then he turns and starts down Massachusetts towards Eighteenth Street. And Buck follows.

He’s—Steve can feel Bucky’s pulse, where he’s latched onto his wrist. Can feel the sluggish-slow thrum of his heartbeat, aligned with the howl and scrape of his song, like the hum of harp strings shuddering in sympathy. He’s close enough that Steve can feel the heat of Buck’s body against his back, that Buck has to shorten his stride up tight to keep from stepping on Steve’s heels.

Steve’s hackles are going up again, prickle of muscle pulling tight down the length of his spine like his body is convinced there’s enough hair back there to make a threat display, stand fur on end like pissed-off punctuation marks. Jesus, when did he get so bad at being close to people? At being touched?

“Bucky, this is—” Break it down, piece it back together again so it makes some kinda sense in the Soldier’s black and white sketched outline of a world. “This is my operation. Extraction of a target, civilian, high value, before Hydra gets to him. I got no idea what kinda opposition to expect, I got no intel. And I don’t expect you to come with me. This is my mess, I’m cleaning it up.”

Steve glances back, studies Bucky’s face—he’s watching Steve, close and careful like there’s gonna be a quiz at the end. Blinks when he catches Steve’s gaze and looks away, fixes his stare onto Steve’s shoulder. Swallows.

“M’ready to comply,” Bucky rasps.

Shit—Steve’s eyes-front again.

Gotta keep track of where they are in the foot traffic, Sunday afternoon flow of pedestrians, boozy late lunches or heading for the evening service at St Thomas or shopping or—if he walks into somebody, if they walk into somebody, the veil goes to pieces and Hydra sees ‘em coming.

So he’s gotta focus, pay attention, he can’t—

Can’t stare at Bucky’s face like a love-struck teenager, trying to read every trace of fractured micro-expression that ricochets across his face.

“Thing is, you don’t gotta comply,” Steve says, tells the concrete underfoot, the passing hotel fronts, the two dames walking past in sky-high heels with their arms linked together, laughing at something on a phone. “This isn’t Hydra, and I’m not your handler. You got one mission, sweetheart, and that’s stay alive and outta Hydra’s hands. Anything you wanna do outside of that mission—that’s up to you.”

Silence from the rear. They hit Eighteenth and Steve bears right, weaves around a cyclist. Boxed in trees and bushes set alongside the footpath, their leaves the kinda slick and greasy green you get in cities, plant life sucking in air and getting exhaust and smog and cigarette smoke.

Steve glances back again, get another look at—Buck is watching the cars going past, wolf-grey eyes darting.

“You copy?” Steve asks.

“Copy,” Bucky parrots back, immediate and thoughtless as blinking, and then his eyes dart to Steve’s and jolt away, like putting your hand on a hot stovetop.

“Incomplete intel. I don’t—” He stops, eyes darting again. Swallows. Tries again. “I’m—I gotta select my targets?”

Jesus wept. “Yeah, Buck. You wanna go to war, you can. Or you can sit in the sandwich shop on the corner and eat a tuna fish on rye. You don’t gotta do a single thing I say. I’ll back your play, any way you make it.”

Another long silence—crossing P Street, older trees leaning overhead, sparse canopy of winter-stripped sticks and twigs spanning across the footpath. And then—

“Extraction of a target, civilian,” Bucky says.

Steve closes his eyes for a couple seconds. Something sharp punches in through the wall of his chest, hot and razor-edged and malicious, makes it hard to breathe past— _Ave Maria, gratia plena_.

If Steve told him the op was jumping offa Brooklyn Bridge, would Bucky—and Steve doesn’t _want_ this.

Doesn’t want Buck Goddamn latched onto him like he’s the only solid thing in a world turned to saltwater and quicksand. He wants Bucky at his back because he’s _choosing to be there_ , clear-eyed and healed and whole in his mind, his soul. But he’ll settle for Buck being okay, just fuckin’ _okay_ , and—

And there is exactly no fuckin’ time to lie down and weep about this shit. No time to claw at his hair and cover his face in ashes and grieve.

He’s gotta get Sam out of the fire. Gotta root out Hydra and tear them down and salt their Goddamn earth.

So—so this is happening. He wants JB Barnes, and right now what he’s got is a Hell of a lot more Winter Soldier, and he’s just gotta—fucking get on with the job.

“Target for extraction is Sam Wilson,” Steve says, and if his voice comes out serial-killer flat, Bucky isn’t gonna be the one to call him out on it. “He’s my friend.”

*******

Sam’s car is parked half a block up the street from Steve’s building.

And there are three cop cars parked catty-corner across the building entrance, blocking the drive into the lot, and—

No one in any of the cop cars. No sign of Sam on the street.

“Here goes nothin’,” Steve says, and they go inside.

Steve’s lived here for most of two years, and he’s a paranoid piece of shit who’s spent most of that two years failing to sleep and plotting out escape routes, if SHIELD or Interpol or the Goddamn FBI ever came for him.

He’s got easy a dozen ways to get up to his apartment, unseen or with extreme prejudice.

None of those plans allow for towing along three-hundred-some pounds of metal-armed assassin, so—what the Hell.

They take the lift.

Any kinda normal tactical situation, you wouldn’t take the lift. No way in Hell—you get stuck in a six-by-six metal box with electronic controls on the outside, you fuckin’ die in there. Which is why the cops—Hydra, whoever it is up there—won’t see ‘em coming. This is the kind of cunning that dances on the knife-edge of being suicidally stupid.

They’re veiled, invisible. Changes the whole game.

Into the lift and Steve hits every button—make it look random, some misfiring of the program—and then the door slides shut and Steve—

Breathe. Keep breathing, man.

Christ, but he fuckin’ hates lifts. Hates the feeling of metal, tight around him, closed. It’s a slightly scaled-up coffin, it’s the feel of the Valkyrie’s steel belly frozen-melded to his exposed dead flesh for sixty-some years and—

Second floor. Christ, get your head in the game, Rogers.

Doors slide closed again. Steve runs through the conjuring gestures with his free hand, cracking his knuckles as he goes and—and then he looks at Bucky. Buck’s watching the lift doors, eyes narrowed, gun in hand down at his side.

Three cop cars—between six and twelve fellas. Armed. Might be they’re Hydra plants. Might be they’re regular-ass D.C. Metro police, just getting their orders from Hydra, from some Hydra plant higher up in the chain.

And Sam—maybe, if he’s here. If he didn’t park his car and then fuck off down the block to buy a pint of ice cream or God only knows what.

No intel. No fuckin’ clue. Assess, adapt, make up some kinda plan on the fly.

“ _Still I sing bonnie boys, bonnie mad boys_ ,” Steve mutters, low and sing-song, all of his buried Brooklyn Mick accent creepin’ out into his vowels. Rocks on his heels, breathes in deep, and—

Bucky shifts, shoulders rolling back, blinks twice.

“That’s—” He starts, stops, eyes darting side to side, search and rescue inside his skull, pieces of memory, of—

“Your Mom,” he rasps, staring at the far wall. Jaw ticks. “She always— _Sarah_.”

Jesus Christ Almighty—Steve bites down hard on the inside of his cheek to keep from sobbing.

It’s—this is— _he remembers_. Mother Mary, Lord God, oh _Mam_ —and Steve’s heart hurts, sudden and bright and fierce like someone’s butting a cigarette on the muscle.

“Yeah, Buck, she did,” Steve says, thinly, and he’s aware that he’s squeezing Bucky’s arm too hard, hard enough to bruise normal human tissue, and he’s got about as much control over that as he does over the orbit of the moon.

Bucky focuses up, meets Steve’s gaze for a heartbeat, two—

Soulless _ding_ and the lift doors slide open.

Third floor. Steve’s apartment.

There’s a cop standing outside the lift.

D.C. Metro uniform, one of Hammer’s evil Goddamn ViceStar guns in his right fist, half-raised. Keeping watch—lift, stairwell, corridor.

He stares right through them—veiled, hidden. Empty lift car, pal, nothing to worry about.

The gun goes back down to his side.

Steve can hear—shouting, voices jumbled—

“Hands where I can see them! Hands, asshole—”

Coming from his apartment.

One of the voices is Sam’s.

Steve is moving, thoughtless as breath, out and into the corridor, weaving past the cop, Buck close on his heels.

Blur of the painted walls, doors going past, and Steve can hear the patter of his heartbeat in his ears, can hear the white-noise chaos of human songs mashing and meshing—loud, heightened.

He can hear Sam, can hear—

“I’m _not resisting_ , I’m not armed. I’m _not armed_ ,” he’s saying, voice strung thin and flat, chanting it like it’s a spell.

Circle of protection against racist cops—Jesus Christ, what a fucking nightmare.

Last door on the right and—it’s standing open, wood shattered around the lock where they’ve forced it, and beyond—hallway, gouge half-plastered in the wall, lingering stink of Miranda Cobalt’s blood and—

At the end—hallway spills out into the living room and Steve can see legs, denim jeans and boots, Sam, down on the floor. Four cops standing over him. Guns drawn—

“I’m not resisting,” Sam says again, grinds out, and—and one of the cops lowers his ViceStar.

“Pack him up, get him back to base,” the cop says—sergeant chevrons on his sleeve. Gotta be him, running this shitshow.

The other cops lower their guns, holster ‘em, bending to scrape Sam up off the ground.

He’s cuffed, hands behind his back. Bleeding freely from his nose and—

And these guys might be Hydra. Might just be Goddamn petty bully asshole cops. Christ knows there’s enough of ‘em out there.

One in the corridor. Four in the living room, clustered around Sam. Thumps and crashes coming from deeper in the apartment—more of ‘em in there. Steve takes a breath, plots it out in his head, draws power up from the well in the bowl of his pelvis. Spare hand moves through the conjuring gestures, twisting, shaping—

Sam’s up, feet under him, shrugging and grimacing against the strain in his shoulders, one of these mooks reefing at his arms from behind.

“One of you gentlemen gonna read me my rights?” he asks, gritting it out.

There’s a half-second of silence, and then—

And then the cop to his right unhooks his baton from his belt and hits Sam in the gut. Full swing of his arm, calm and fluid like he’s on the golf range and—

Sam folds, doubling over, punched-out breathless whine of a silent scream falling out of his mouth and knees buckling and—

And Steve goes to ice. Harder than diamond, colder than Kelvin’s zero-point.

Hydra, then. These guys are Hydra.

Last mistake, cocksucker.

Hand up and Steve snatches the woven spell thread in the air and heaves, _pulls_ with everything he’s got, every shred of hate in his fucked-up little soul, and the sound that spills outta his mouth is a rippling snarl, nothing like human—

_Crang_ of vibranium offa wood from Steve’s bedroom, a yelp of pain, and then—

And then Steve’s shield shoots out the bedroom door, bounces off the bathroom door frame, flies straight as an arrow for Steve’s hand.

The _come-here_ spell works on gravity. Changes how gravity works, direction and strength and relationships between objects.

And the funny thing about gravity is, it’s mindless, thoughtless. Not malicious, but if you get in under a falling piano, you get fuckin’ crushed by it.

There are two mooks between Steve’s hand and the shield.

There’s—it’s a wet sound, sticky-iron sigh of meat opening up—shield through the skin and tendon and muscle of the first guy’s neck, hard edge like a blunt-force buzzsaw and the guy’s staggering, lurching, falling, panic-quick sprays of arterial blood hitting the far wall—

—and Steve keeps his hand up, pulls harder at the _come-here_ spell, and the shield howls, cutting open thin air like a surgeon’s scalpel and—

Into the back of the next guy’s head, quick and clean as a slaughterhouse airgun. Crunch of bone shearing and he’s dropping, limp as a sack of potatoes—

And the shield bounces, shoots up in the air. Steve reefs at the _come-here_ spell, hauling it in like he’s heaving on the leash of a badly trained dog, and the shield course-corrects in midair and shoots for his hand again, straight and true as a bullet from a gun and—

Steve drops the spell, half-turns and steps outta the way, shoves Buck in the other direction, outta the line of fire. The shield screams past between ‘em like a hawk striking prey, hits the wall— _crunch_ of shattering—and lodges, stickin’ outta the wood and plasterboard like a sore thumb.

Half-second of stunned stillness—these guys are tactical, trained to adapt and respond rapidly when the shit hits the fan, but no one is ever really prepared to be attacked from the rear by a Goddamn inanimate object—

—and then Bucky lifts his left hand and shoots the squid in the hallway.

The guy’s face caves in from the eyebrows up, red-white-pink spray of blood and brain, and he’s crumpling backwards, limp and silent and—

No ICER rounds in that gun. Holy Mary, Mother of God—

Veil is down—they’re visible, exposed—

Two more squids in the living room. Unknown number in the rooms beyond. Gotta put ‘em down hard and fast, before someone has the bright idea to use Sam as leverage.

Steve puts his head down and _runs_ —squids are reefing their ViceStars back outta holsters, gun barrels coming up and—

—hallway opens into the living room and Steve taps the dermal at the base of his sternum. Veils, goes dark.

Jinks right, hard, vaulting across the armchair in the way—

Ear-splitting _crack_ of gunfire—one two, squids shooting at Steve, at the empty space he was filling half a second ago, loud as a thunderclap in the close quarters of the apartment.

Steve lands and drops into a half-crouch, pulling the knife outta his boot sheath and prowling forward, into flanking position—

They’re both still squared into shooting stance, firing round after round down the hall, at—Buck, Christ, it must be Bucky drawing fire, keeping ‘em distracted, and there is exactly no time to have a panic attack about—and Steve stalks up invisible next to squid one, asshole in the sergeant’s uniform—

Grabs a handful of collar with his spare hand—veil dissolving, falling apart like spun sugar in the rain—plants his right foot in the fold of the guy’s knee, and then he’s digging with a booted toe into tendon and muscle, hauling back at his throat, and the guy’s firing wild— _crack_ of a round hitting the ceiling, hope to Christ there’s no one home upstairs—

—and Steve half-jumps, shoving up offa the guy’s leg to reach, jams the knife into the guy’s neck under the ear—

—aiming up and back, brainstem, _goodnight_ —

The guy folds like a bad hand of cards, twitching convulsively, last frantic garbled messages between dying brain and body, and Steve reefs the knife back out and pivots, turns to the next squid—

And the mook’s turning, putting his back to the wall, putting some space between them and chanting, “ _Shit, shit_ —”

—gun coming around to point at Steve’s face and—

Double-tap clap of gunfire—Steve’s ears are dead, all mindless ringing howl broken by the sharp _slaps_ of bullets firing—and the guy’s thrown sideways, signal flares of red blood spitting from his centre mass.

Bucky—he’s halfway down the corridor and advancing, gun up. In his right hand is Steve’s shield. Mouth a flat line, eyes narrowed, absolute focus, and his song is shrieking, _shrieking_.

Okay, so—four squids down, Sam is—

Sam’s over next to the armchair, curled up on his knees, hands still cuffed in the back. Shaking hard and heaving for breath. Fuck, he’d better—better just be winded. If he’s got broken ribs, they’re fucked—and there’s more, more Hydra fucks deeper in the apartment.

First things—“Sam, you okay?” Steve calls, and he’s burning colder than the ink-black void of space so his voice comes flat, dead.

Sam shudders hard, and then one of his cuffed hands makes a fist, thumb poking out, and he’s nodding, forehead to his knees.

Thumbs up. Sam’s okay. He’s a medic: Steve’s gonna trust his call, here. Not hurt bad, not gonna die anytime soon.

Not if Steve’s got any Goddamn say in it.

Okay, so next cab off the rank is—and Steve’s turning, mashing the flat of his palm against his chest to press on his lowest piercing, quick-deploy veil again—

—and then the next couple Hydra goons spill outta Steve’s bedroom, guns up and firing at—at Bucky, at the only visible target, bullets humming past Steve’s left shoulder close enough he can feel the heat of ‘em, the hornet’s-buzz press of superheated air against his skin.

Fuck, that was too close—can hear the hum of vibranium from behind him, musical chime of bullets shearing off Steve’s shield.

Steve flips the knife in his grip, cocks his arm, and throws, hard—plants the blade in the guy’s belly, punching through the blue of his uniform shirt, and Steve’s lunging forward, low and fast, up and under the squid’s arms—grabs the knife by the the hilt, slick with blood and sweat, and shoves the blade down, deeper, towards the gut, the pelvis—

The goon convulses back, knees folding and clapping both hands to his gut like he’s gonna hold himself together, Godawful unearthly wail coming outta his mouth and Steve’s veil is gone again, sloughing off in shards of dirty gold light and—

He’s maybe three feet away from the second squid, down on one knee and exposed, and his knife is still stuck in that asshole’s gut and—

The squid blinks, eyes darting from him to Buck and back and—and then he falls back. Back into Steve’s bedroom, ducking behind the door and—

Flat _bang_ of gunfire again and there’s a hole in the Goddamn wall at Steve’s eye height—howl of pain from the bedroom in reply.

Steve looks around, looks—Bucky, shield down at his side, textbook one-hand shooting stance, greasy locks of dark hair strung across his narrowed eyes. Steady like he’s carved from granite.

He’s shot the asshole square and clean through the wall.

Jesus fuckin’ Christ on a cracker—Steve heaves himself forward, back up onto his feet and into the bedroom, into—

The squid is down, sprawled across Steve’s fuckin’ hobo floor bed. Bloom of red and a neat puncture hole in the right side of his chest. Gun wedged where it’s fallen, half-behind Steve’s pillow.

The squid is—mouth falling open, spilling frothy red—musta nicked the lung—and groping for his shoulder, for—radio. Clip on radio, mounted on his shirt at the right collarbone.

Steve lunges, kicks the goon’s hand away—“ _No_ ,” he’s snarling, and then he bends, rips the radio off, throws it across the room.

Hydra’s gonna know they were here soon enough, don’t gotta make it any sooner.

Turns and walks back out, main room, and—

“Stand down, asset.”

There’s a Hydra mook with a ViceStar gun digging into the back of Bucky’s neck, like he’s trying to lodge the end of the barrel between trachea and spine.

Where in the Christ did this motherfucker come from?

Could he—maybe he was up the far end of the kitchen? And Steve fuckin’ missed him. Sloppy.

Shit, _fuck_.

The Hydra asshole looks away from Buck, half-second, blinking sweat away, meeting Steve’s gaze—“Stay the _fuck_ back. I’ll kill him. Stay back.”

Steve stays, blinking hard, watching, waiting—

The squid is an older guy, lean and wiry and grey up top, hair buzzed Marine-short, dark sweat in the creases of his blue shirt where he’s got his arm up, full extension, far enough back that Buck can’t get to him before—at this kinda range, one of Hammer’s malign fuckin’ pieces of hardware, he’ll take Buck’s fuckin’ head clean off.

Steve takes a deep breath. Studies the terrain—

Buck, frozen in place, look of tightly contained fury around his eyes, the line of his jaw.

Squid fucker, pale and focused, arm shaking with tension.

Couple bodies underfoot, trip hazards.

And Sam, arms still cuffed behind his back, up on his feet and moving, prowling forward, slow and silent.

“ _Verni svoye oruzhiye_ ,” the Hydra asshole says, slow and awkward like he’s copying the sounds from somewhere. Bucky flinches, shudder running down the length of his body, plates on his weapon arm twitching and re-aligning, and they make a low mechanical kinda purr like something rattling under the hood of a car—

And Sam eases forward another couple feet and—

“Now,” the squid barks, and—

Sam oozes forward one more step, light, like he’s dancing. Twists and coils one leg up. Kicks the squid clean in the meat of his armpit, upraised arm, booted toes punched into flesh like Sam’s trying to get clear out the other side.

The sound that falls outta the Hydra fuck’s mouth is—when you’re hunting, when you’re bringing down a reindeer, right before you clamp their airway closed with your teeth, they’ll give this grunting kinda wail. It’s a wheezing, broken, animal cry.

The ViceStar drops, hits the floor—his whole arm is heaving, nerve and tendon and muscle convulsing, and then the guy’s half-turning to see the new threat and Sam—

—stumbles, almost falling, balance thrown off with his arms bound back. Gets his feet planted square again—steps in, close enough to embrace, teeth bared in a snarl, and headbutts the guy.

The squid is sinking, woozy, tripping over one of the bodies underfoot, falling, and—and Steve moves, forward, striding the short distance to—

Bucky is watching Sam, watching the squid go down like a lead balloon, studying. Steve hauls up and brakes right in front of him, grabs for Bucky’s neck, both hands, feeling for injury, blunt fingertips meeting round the back, the nape of his spine.

And Bucky blinks, startled, fades back a half-step, and then prowls into the kitchen.

Shit.

Steve doesn’t—shouldn’t have—Christ. Jesus Christ, that was—stupid.

This ain’t a fuckin’ petting zoo, and that isn’t your fuckin’ boyfriend.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Sam’s got his boot on the Hydra mook’s neck and he’s bearing down, slow and steady, his chest heaving. The squid gags, claws, shoves with one hand at Sam’s foot—and Sam bears down harder, drops more of his weight on—

“Aren’t you gonna tell me I’m better than this?” Sam asks. His voice comes shaken, dark as spilled ink. He’s staring down at the Hydra asshole, watching him gasp for breath like he’s mesmerised.

“Sam, these guys are Hydra,” Steve says. “Killing ‘em was kinda my main hobby for most of the Forties. I’m not gonna rain on your parade.”

He stops, wets his lips, starts again, because—because there’s combat and then there’s torture, and Sam is one of the good guys. “But you are better than this.”

Sam blinks hard, shoves his foot down deeper for a half second—and then lets up, lifts his foot away.

“Hydra?” he asks, and then he looks up, looks Steve in the eye and—

Blinks harder. Flinches, falling back half a step like he’s seen—oh, shit.

Jesus Christ.

He’s seen _Steve_.

Steve in his real body, his real freak-show face. Outta nowhere, no warning, for the first time.

Fuck, he looks like he’s seen the spectre of Grim fuckin’ Death—

“It’s me, it’s okay,” Steve says, and at the same time—

“ _Steve_?” Sam is asking, wild-eyed and bleeding sick-pale.

“It’s me,” Steve says again. “I’m sorry, I know, I’ll explain everything, but we need to get the Hell outta here now before Hydra send more—”

Bucky stalks back in, focused up like a fox catching the scent of prey on a cross-breeze, strides across the room to—side door, into the cramped bathroom, tearing the door open—

There’s a Hydra goon half-crouched against the bathroom wall—bathroom drawers opened, Steve’s first aid kit and spare toothpaste and hidden stash of lipsticks dumped in the sink like the guy was searching the place and—

“It’s Rogers,” he’s saying, low, into his shoulder-mounted radio. Looks up and sees them, sees them seeing him, and his gaze is flat and furious. “Rogers, and he’s got the asset.”

Lets go of the radio and picks up his gun from the bathroom counter, and—

“Cut off one he—” the squid starts, and Bucky shoots him in the face.

Ringing silence—wailing in Steve’s fucked ears like a grieving child. In the distance, there’s a raising howl of sirens.

Cops, incoming.

Maybe the real deal. Maybe more Hydra fucks.

Steve looks around—Bucky, shield in hand. Bare feet slick with blood, none of it his. Sam, still half-frozen and staring, like all the wheels have fallen offa his train of thought.

There’s a Goddamn half-dozen bodies on Steve’s living room floor. Hope to Christ none of the neighbours were home, caught in the hail of HammerTech rounds coming through the walls, floors, ceiling—

“The Hell is happening, man?” Sam asks, rasping like something is broken open inside his chest.

Steve answers, “We gotta move.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilery end note for this chapter: Sam Wilson is beaten by some Hydra fuckos, who are appearing to be police officers. I promise he will be okay. If you'd rather skim lightly over that section, then you'll want to stop reading at:
> 
> "At the end—hallway spills out into the living room..."
> 
> and then jump in again at:
> 
> "Hydra, then. These guys are Hydra."
> 
> which is about 12 paragraph breaks later.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The tags for ill-advised sex and dubious consent apply to this chapter. I've tagged like so because there isn't really a straightforward way to tag for "Sex that everyone involved in is technically consenting to, but also they shouldn't really be having because they're both/all really fucked up, but they're gonna go there anyway because they're both/all too fucked up to recognise that it's not a great idea."

They go out the window of Steve's apartment, down the fire escape, all pace and attitude and no Goddamn veil because there’s no way Steve can stretch it over the three of ‘em—Steve, Bucky, Sam—while they’re strung out down the narrow metal stairway.

His head is starting to hurt. Like fuckin’ Christ does it hurt: too much magic, sorcery, veils and conjuring and—and not enough—food. Sleep. Biology stuff.

He was disembodied for decades. Sue him if he forgets about the biology stuff sometimes.

And then they’re dropping from the last landing into the alley, stink of diapers and rotting food from outta the dumpster and—scrape of booted feet on concrete from behind and Steve is turning, bringing his shield up—

Catches a glimpse of tac gear, a holstered gun—

Bucky shifts, sliding one foot back to narrow his stance, metal arm coming up with the P30 in his fist, smooth and thoughtless as blinking or sneezing.

“ _Shit_ ,” comes yelped from up the alleyway, bouncing flatly off brick—and movement, bodies ducking back, fading behind the dumpster and—

Steve grabs Bucky by the torn scrub shirt, lets the shield slip down over his wrist and slaps his open palm to Sam’s forearm. Throws a fast and sloppy veil over all of them—

“ _Hold,_ ” Steve barks, and Buck goes still as a Goddamn statue and Sam twitches but holds, holds steady.

Past the Godawful wail of Bucky’s song, the crack of wind that is Sam’s music, Steve can hear—horses, hoofbeats on sawdust, and a sky-high whistling note of—

“ _Marco_ ,” comes Clint’s voice, from behind the dumpster.

“Polo,” Steve calls back, dropping the veil.

Clint pops the corner around the dumpster—Steve can see a slice of face, shoulder, an elbow. Waits for half a second—no hail of bullets—and then he oozes out from behind the dumpster and strides up the alley to their position.

He’s shock-pale, mouth pursed to a dead-flat line. Focused up and narrowed down like he gets when the mission has gone to shit and they’re picking up the pieces and stickin’ ‘em together again with blood and sweat.

And half a step behind him comes—flash of gold hair, navy pant suit—Agent 13. Good neighbour Kate.

Clint was—he was going to the Triskelion. Going to find Coulson, get eyes on Pierce, on Director Fury. What the fuck’s happened in the last half hour—

“Sitrep?” Steve asks, and—

He’s using the Cap voice. Like he’s got any right to it now: not commanding a STRIKE team or a Commando unit but standing in his freak show real body in an alley, one more fugitive among fugitives—

“Coulson is dead,” Clint says, the words torn up like they’re coming through his sternum.

It hits like a howitzer shell.

Like a rotting floor board just snapped and Steve’s in free fall.

Jesus Christ, Jesus _fuck_ —

“ _What_?” Steve says, spills outta him.

He heard. He heard fine. It’s just— _Christ_.

They’d spoke to Phil Coulson less’n an hour ago.

And he was _alive_ , investigating, at the Triskelion where he oughta been _safe_ and— _fuck_.

“Fury and Hill have gone dark. Off the grid,” Agent 13 rattles off. She’s paste pale, shaken, hanging onto her crisp professional front by the grace of God. “There was some kind of firefight in the 30th floor conference room. Pierce has control of SHIELD, of the Triskelion, and he’s controlling the narrative. We’ve got to go to ground.”

What the Hell happened—in the space of a fuckin’ hour. What the fuck.

Steve is—he’s going wide. Seeping out of his skin like there’s a slow leak, and he’s distantly aware that he’s staring at a brick wall, frozen in place. And Clint—

Clint looks like he’s bleeding out from somewhere in his fuckin’ soul, furious and anguished and—shit. How long were he and Coulson friends—a decade, more?

And there’s no time for this. They’ve gotta move, now. Police sirens—they’re maybe thirty seconds away.

Hydra is gonna be crawling up their asses any second now.

Deep breath. Get it _the fuck_ together.

“Okay,” Steve says, just to say something, kick start the engine of his mouth and tongue and lungs, and then—“I’ll hide us, and then we move out. Borrow a car and get some distance and come up with our next move.”

_Ave Maria, gratia plena_ —let this rosary be for the soul of—

Fuck. He can’t do this now.

“The Soldier?” Agent 13 asks, and it’s shorthand— _is he coming with us, is he_ with _us, what the Hell is happening here_ —

“With me,” Steve grates out; feels Bucky shifting his weight, shoulders rolling forward like he’s dropping his weight lower, battle-ready.

Steve looks—at Buck, staring down the far end of the alley, keeping watch. At Sam, mouth and jaw all flat focus, wild around the eyes—he’s a soldier, on point and steady, but this is fuckin’ nothing like how he’d imagined his Sunday afternoon going. At Clint, wading hip deep in grief and still here, weapons at his back. At Kate—or 13, or whatever the Christ her name is—gun holstered under her left arm, clear-eyed, poised like she’s ready to move.

“Let’s go,” Steve says.

*******

They move under seemings—enough to hide their features from facial recognition, tracking algorithms and cameras on every corner. Enough to soften Clint’s tac suit into something like bike leathers, shift the hard curve of Steve's shield into a backpack, turn the gleam of Bucky’s metal arm into a plaster cast. Enough to make them part of the wallpaper, unremarkable.

Scattered among the pedestrians, D.C. foot traffic, wolves in deerskin moving through the herd.

Cop cars howl past, one two three, and then a minute later an unmarked black van goes by, armoured. Maybe SWAT. Probably Hydra. Jesus, just how many of these fuckers are there—

“So, you have a new face now,” Sam says, from someplace behind Steve’s left ear. He’s walking a few paces behind, illusion looking like the young Black fella who does night shifts at Steve’s corner store. “And so do I. And you, uh. Wiggled your nose like Samantha the witch to make it happen. You gonna tell me what that’s about?”

Holy Mary, Mother of God.

“It’s sorcery,” Steve says, staying facing front, casual. There’s a parking garage a couple blocks up, dealer’s choice of cars to steal, and undercover, off the street. _Keep it together_ until you get there, asshole. “Because I’m Samantha the witch. I’m sorry, man, this has gotta be a Hell of a shock—”

“It’s cool, I’m cool,” Sam says, and there is nothing Goddamn cool about the unhinged note in his voice. “I’m, uh, sitting at about a sixteen outta ten on my personal crazy shit scale, but, you know. It’s cool. We gonna get someplace away from the bad guys, introduce ourselves, maybe get into how that thousand-mile-stare dude on your arm looks a Helluva lot like deceased war hero, Bucky Barnes?”

Shit—Steve shoulda expected that.

Sam never made any big deal out of it, but Steve knows he must have picked up a biography or two, filled in some background detail, after Steve blundered into his life. Which means he woulda seen his share of Bucky mugshots, lovingly hand coloured and glossy printed.

Steve glances over at the real Buck—thousand mile staring, his arm through Steve’s rigid like it’s carved from granite. His seeming makes him look like one of the fellas who worked the bar at the Black Cat, Steve’s favourite underground queer bar circa 1938.

“Yeah,” Steve says, thinly. “We’ve got a couple things to talk about.”

*******

In the parking garage—

“ _Attention, SHIELD_ ,” Coulson is saying.

It’s video, a recording, cramped small on the screen of Agent 13’s phone. Sent out on SHIELD’s internal comms server forty minutes ago.

Coulson looks—alive, _fuck_. Pale, sharp, pissed off.

“ _This is Agent Philip Coulson, Level Six. We are under attack_.” He pauses, rubs at his mouth, his chin. There’s a smear of blood across the backs of his knuckles, fresh enough that it’s still a dirty red, not faded to brown.

“ _Hydra are here. We thought we were immune to their poison, and we were wrong. They are here, among our ranks, in our STRIKE teams and our labs and standing next to you. They are trained, and skilled, and resourced, because they are_ us _, and right now they are damn close to taking total control of the United States, with SHIELD as their Trojan Horse_.”

He shifts on screen, purses his lips, rolls his shoulders back, continues: “ _So if there was ever a time for us to step up—to be the shield, to protect a world that needs us—it’s now. We cannot let them win, or come to define us. We need to rise above ourselves._ ”

Another pause, a couple heartbeats. He glances down from the camera and back up again, fixed, fierce, searching. “ _Here’s what we know so far: Jasper Sitwell, Level Six, Hydra agent. Brock Rumlow, Level Five, STRIKE Team Alpha. The men of STRIKE Echo: Jason Rains, Greg Stevanovich, Shaun Long_ —”

From the background comes the sound of a door opening, muted thud of wood and metal against a wall.

Coulson looks up from the video—not alarmed. He doesn’t flinch, or pale, or make any kinda face like he knows he’s about to die, he just—

“ _What’s the sit_ —” he starts saying, and then the recording stops.

Transmission ended.

The silence is heavy as liquid lead. Steve stares into the black of the screen, and his ugly fuckin’ reflection stares back.

Clears his throat. Looks up: Agent 13 is leant against the bumper of a car, her arms crossed, staring at the tarmac like it said something nasty about her mother.

“You found him?” Steve asks.

Carter—13—she looks up. Clint’s dropped the name, her name, a couple times now: _Carter_ , like—

Steve hasn’t got up the gumption yet to ask her if she’s any relation.

“In the security hub on Level Four,” she says, quiet, thin. Like she’s forcing the words out, like they’re hurting her.

“Gunshot wound to the head. Clean, no signs of a struggle, no defensive wounds. He didn’t see it coming. Must have thought—”

She stops, closes her eyes, breathes in and out, slow and very controlled. Opens her eyes and starts again. “Must have thought they were a friend. An ally. And they were Hydra, and they killed him.”

Steve takes his own deep breath, wraps one hand around the other fist and squeezes ’til his knuckles pop.

He’d never—never let himself get too close to Phil Coulson. It was protective: the guy was too clever, too insightful. Too versed in Captain America’s Goddamn lore. Too likely to see through Steve’s bullshit, if he got close. But he was—he was _good people_ , integral and so fuckin’ dedicated, and Goddamn _brave_. The kinda dry-as-dust sense of humour that tickles Steve’s twentieth century sensibilities.

He was good people.

And now he’s meat and bone, soul departed, his song stopped cold. His place in the vast over-symphony of the world’s song is a lull beat, silenced.

Steve hands the phone back to Carter. She takes it, strips open the back, destroys the SIM card, efficient, practiced.

“So Fury and Hill are underground, or dead,” Steve says. “And Pierce is running SHIELD.”

“Which means Hydra is running SHIELD,” Carter says, looks Steve in the eye. “That’s about the shape of it.”

“I guess that makes us the resistance,” Steve says, running through the hexing gestures, both hands.

“You don’t seem too torn up about that,” Carter observes, eyebrows shifting and mouth quirking in a way that—

It’s so Goddamn reminiscent of Peggy that for a second Steve’s breath catches cold in his chest.

Jesus Christ, she must be related. Must be—she’s too young to be a daughter. Granddaughter, maybe, or a niece, or—

And Steve’s been staring at her fuckin’ face like he’s mesmerised for a good couple heartbeats too long. “Never did like bullies,” Steve replies.

Division of labour: Clint is stood against a concrete pillar, head down and talking low and rapid on a burner phone—he’s finding ‘em a safe place to land, shaking trees and shaking down contacts. He’s still pale, his gaze hollowed empty like he’s bleeding out from hidden wounds. Gives Steve a nod—which means _success_ , means he’s found ‘em something—as Steve goes by.

Heading over to check in with Buck, the car he’s in the process of stealing.

He’s latched onto this big ugly all-wheel drive, rust smeared up from the wheel wells. Right this second he’s a pair of legs in torn blue scrubs, blood-stained bare feet, sticking out from under the carriage. Doing some obscure mechanical shit in the belly of the beast—checking for tracers or checking for bombs or checking the Goddamn wheel alignment, who the fuck knows.

Steve raps on the hood of the truck. “Rolling out in five.”

Heartbeat of silence, and then a plastic and metal tearing kinda sound, and then, “ _Da_ ,” Bucky answers, muffled through the body of the car.

Might not remember his own Goddamn name, but JB Barnes can get just about any kinda machine to see things his way, given enough time and sweat.

And then Steve’s moving on again, down the ramp, rows of cars going by, and about halfway down the ramp is—

Sam. He’s behind the row of parked cars and propping up the metal side rail, arms crossed, brow down and gazing into the mid-distance. Bruising around both wrists, where he was cuffed.

He’s—taller than Steve. Gonna have to get used to that.

This is the new normal. They all know who Steve is now, what he really is. There is no walking this back.

Steve stops a car length away, scrapes at the tarmac with a booted foot—make some noise, announce himself, because he ain’t silly enough to startle a combat veteran—and Sam focuses up, meets his gaze. Studies Steve, openly, his expression—confusion, fascination, grief.

“So,” Sam says, breaks the silence. “I mean, I’ve been doing this whole counselling veterans thing for a while. I got some skills. I figured there was something you weren’t telling me, but I… I would not have guessed this.” He waves a shaking hand at Steve, the Steve-ness of him.

If this was the Forties, if Sam was one of his Commandos, Steve would be offering him a cigarette right about now. They musta phased that outta the soul-trauma first aid kit right about the time folks found out smokes cause cancer. He’s gotta strangle the urge to pat down his pockets and find the pack that he doesn’t have.

A blunt, maybe, or booze. Not much you can’t wallpaper over with enough booze.

“What was your guess?” Steve asks, drops into a lean against the bonnet of the red car to his right.

Sam quirks his mouth. “I was imagining a deep guilt complex about some bad shit that happened in the field. Lotta guys have to do things in combat that they don’t feel good about. The blood doesn’t ever really wash away. So—that, or some kinda latent sexuality crisis.”

Steve makes a choked noise, chews at the inside of his cheek to keep his lunatic grin under control— _Jesus Christ_ , Sam—and then he stands up and walks over to Sam, faces him square on. Face in the light, eye to eye, seeing and being seen. Thrusts a hand out like they’re gonna shake.

“I’m Steve,” he says. “My Da was a space alien. I’m a sorcerer. I’m a shapeshifter, and I moonlight as Captain America. And I had my sexuality crisis back in the Thirties.”

Sam is studying him, blinking, his face held in neutral. Eyes dart from Steve’s mouth, his fangs, to his neck, the edge of whirling scarification coiled under Steve’s ear, to his wolf eyes, to—he shifts, puts his hand out to clasp Steve’s.

“I’m Sam,” he says. “I’m a veteran, and a counsellor. I’m usually pretty good at reading people, but every now and then I get blindsided.”

“I’m sorry, man,” Steve says. “It wasn’t—I’ve seen people arrested for being queer, chased outta neighbourhoods for being Black, or Jewish, or—I couldn’t imagine a world where folks would be okay with me being… half human, half something else, all freak show. I’ve hid what I am my whole damn life.”

Sam nods, slow, and then he gives Steve’s hand a squeeze and breaks the hold, does some kinda fist bump ritual thing to Steve’s outstretched hand.

“I hear that,” he says—and it’s not an _apology accepted_ , but it’s better than nothin’. “You wanna tell me what the Hell is going on?”

Jesus Christ on a crutch.

“Uh,” Steve says, combing his fingers into his rat’s nest of hair, because where the fuck does he start, and then: “SHIELD is full of Nazis.”

“SHIELD is Hydra,” Sam says, level and inflectionless, like he’s been disappointed enough times that none of this shit surprises him anymore, and then half a heartbeat later he blinks and: “Hydra is running the country?”

“You’re seeing the problem,” Steve says.

*******

The safe house Clint’s found ‘em is in Philadelphia.

It’s close to three hours of driving. Steve’s head feels like an overripe fruit, pulp and juice being slowly squeezed through tears in the skin, like Jesus Christ it hurts so bad—and he can’t stop, can’t give it a rest, needs to keep conjuring seemings—cover the truck, hide the faces of the people inside, changing every twenty minutes or so because Hydra will be looking for them, with all of Goddamn SHIELD’s resources at their disposal for the manhunt.

He does the last hour of the drive with his head between his knees, vision greyed out, counting his breath in cycles to keep from panting or—or fuckin’ sobbing.

He can’t stop. There isn’t a Plan B—SHIELD has eyes everywhere. This is the job. Hold it together.

Steve’s distantly aware of the truck pulling in to park, the creak of the parking brake, doors opening and bodies moving around him.

He’s still holding together the seemings over their faces—until they get inside, anyway. SHIELD has access to traffic cameras, private security footage, cell phone cameras, fucking drones—they can’t be seen, can’t be exposed—

“Rogers?” It’s Clint asking, his voice coming droning and distant past the roar of the music, the vast collision of songs from people and cars and buildings and the sky, the ground, Steve’s magic, the fucking air—

“I’m gonna touch you now, okay?” From somewhere next to Steve’s elbow. It’s Sam’s voice, low and soothing, like he’s talking down a skittish dog. Or a traumatised vet.

And then Steve is being manhandled outta the car and up and—he’s in a Goddamn bridal carry, this is Goddamn humiliating. If his fuckin’ brain didn’t hurt like it was being slow-basted in molten lead, he’d be clawing his way outta—it’s Sam, Sam holding him, his song welling up like floodwater.

Seventy-ish years ago, it woulda been Bucky.

There were at least a dozen ops where he’d ended up carrying Steve outta there, muttering cuss words or watchful and silent as the grave, while Steve held a dozen spell threads in his head at once or was limp as a cooked spaghetti noodle. Too much magic.

And now Bucky’s the Soldier, and he doesn’t remember any of that.

_Fuck_ , everything hurts. Keep breathing, you dumb son of a bitch, _you ain’t under cover yet_ , keep breathing—

And then there’s fabric, softness, something giving under him—he’s being lowered, dumped onto—it’s gotta be a sofa, feels like a loose spring lodged under his ass, stink of old cigarette smoke and dust rising in a cloud from the cushion.

Sofa. Means he’s indoors. Means—

Steve lets go—lets go of all the seemings, every layer of illusion, bodies and faces and clothes and over the truck, and for a second it’s almost fuckin’ orgasmic, the utter relief, like falling into an ice water bath after broiling alive with a fever.

And then his gut heaves and he’s writhing, twisting onto his side and turning the dull lead weight of his head so he doesn’t puke on himself and retching and—it’s bile. Whole lotta nothin’ but bile. He hasn’t eaten in—too long.

Fucking _biology_.

Cracks his eyes open. For a couple seconds he’s blind, wildfire bright light and colours with no pattern or meaning, and then his eyes focus up and he sees brown. Dead leaves, twigs, soil. He’s puking into a potted plant.

Bucky’s holding it, brown of old blood smeared over the pale of his human hand, dead fuckin’ pot plant poised neatly under Steve’s mouth. He’s eyes up, his gaze darting around, studying everything, and that brutal clip-point blade is held steady in his weapon hand.

They’re in—it’s the main room of—looks like an apartment, dirty white walls and ash grey carpet, water-stained. Steve sees Carter emerge from a doorway, gun up and focussed, duck into the next room, checking room to room. Can hear Clint—

“Clear!”

Somewhere off behind the sofa, sounds like. Clearing the apartment. Making sure they’re safe.

“You okay, man?” Sam asks, dropping into a squat so he’s eye level with Steve. He’s still like a good four feet back from the couch, body turned so—

So he can keep half an eye on Bucky.

Which—Jesus Christ. Is probably a good call, let’s be fuckin’ real. A good third of Sam’s job at the VA is knowing when his vets are the kinda fucked up that’s above his pay grade. If they need the kinda help that comes from a guy with M.D. after his name, or out of a bottle of little yellow pills. If they’re the kind of fucked up that’s dangerous.

Bucky must be ringing every kinda alarm bell Sam’s got.

“I’m okay,” Steve lies, like a Goddamn idiot because he’s literally still got drool on his chin, he’s not fooling anybody here, and then: “Magic hangover. I’ll walk it off. We need to—need to think about our next move.”

Sam looks down at his toes for a moment, shoulders shifting like he’s taking a good breath, and then he says, “I see the dumbass self-sacrificing comes in fun-sized as well as jumbo.”

“Come on, man,” Steve complains, palming the bile and spit off his chin and collapsing back onto the couch.

*******

Twenty minutes later there is coffee, the nasty instant mix stuff, black because there’s no milk, no creamer; and there’s a weapons cache, packed neatly into battered old suitcases, stacked in the gap where a fridge oughta be. Clearly this place ain’t meant for living in.

So it’s got all the charm of a thumb in the eyeball but it’s caffeine and Steve has scraped himself up to a seated position so he can get the coffee onboard with maximum efficiency and minimum spillage.

Jesus Christ, his fuckin’ _hair_ hurts.

“So what do we know?” Clint is asking, staring into his own chipped mug of coffee. He’s sat on the floor against the far wall—there’s no Goddamn seating in this place. No TV on a stand, no shelving. The one busted sofa, a strangely antique coffee table, the dead pot plant, a whole lotta dust, and what looks like an old blood stain sprawled across the carpet next to the front door.

Really not a place for living in.

“Not a single Goddamn thing,” Sam says, low and very clear, standing against the wall next to that awful fuckin’ brown stain on the carpet.

“What’s happening at SHIELD?” Steve asks. “Coulson’s message hit all the main servers—what’s the response?”

Carter shifts her weight—she’s propping up the other wall, hands fisting and opening at her sides. Nobody seems to wanna share the sofa—and maybe it’s because Steve smells like vomit, or maybe it’s because they’re not game to sit with their backs to the kitchen. Where Buck—the Soldier—is currently going through the weapons cache, steady and systematic and expressionless as a shop mannequin.

Steve cannot blame them. His hackles—his stupid wolf-brain non-existent hackles—are up again.

He’s thought about—the quickest cure for this Goddamn headache is shifting over to his Cap shape, but—

But the last time he’d come near Bucky looking like Cap, the Soldier had done his level best to put his metal fist through Steve’s torso. _Target, Level Six. SHIELD agent. Exposure threat_.

Christ only knows what’ll happen if Steve—so he won’t. Not yet. Needs to—to get clear about what the Hell is going on in Bucky’s head, before he tries that party trick again. Jesus wept, this is Bucky Barnes, this was his _best guy_ , and—

“Coulson’s message went wide,” Carter says. “Every server, every level. But Pierce started spinning the narrative within minutes. Ordered a flurry of arrests, scapegoats, locked down. And he’s saying Fury and Hill are Hydra, and that’s why they’ve gone to ground—”

“Shit,” Clint sighs, closing his eyes and hitting his head against the wall behind him.

“Official line is that Captain Steve Rogers is missing, presumed dead, and you’re a Hydra plant, some kinda clone,” Carter finishes, nodding to Steve.

Which— _fuck_. Occam’s Razor—the simplest explanation is most likely to be true. Pierce’s story sounds a Hell of a lot more plausible than the truth. Sounds a Hell of a lot more plausible than any kinda story Steve can come out with.

_Fuck._ He’s so Goddamn burned.

“Jesus wept,” Steve says. His left eyeball is throbbing in time with his heartbeat. He has another long swig of the Godawful coffee and then leans forward and puts the mug on the floor between his feet.

“Okay,” he says, cracking the knuckles of his right hand. “Let’s put all our cards on the table and find out what kinda hand we’re playing with.”

*******

This is how it shakes out:

Until they can knock Pierce outta his tree, Hydra is effectively running SHIELD.

Clint’s got a couple ideas, a couple protocols for when shit’s got real and they’ve gotta fall back, midnight conditions. Ways to get in touch with Fury and Hill—assuming they’re still alive. But until that happens it’s safe to figure that SHIELD is the enemy, and a pain in the Goddamn ass besides.

Someone in SHIELD’s upper echelons—maybe Pierce, maybe another Hydra plant—dropped a whole lotta currency trying to steal a couple truckloads of HammerTech weapons. Compliance tech, non-lethals. What the Hell they wanted with non-lethal ordnance is a Goddamn mystery—of all the ways you could describe Hydra’s tactical approach over the last century, _non-lethal_ is fuckin’ nowhere on the list.

Natasha is still radio-silent. Maybe she’s on a job, fell off the grid to keep her cover. Maybe Hydra got to her and she’s captive, contained.

Maybe she’s dead. Jesus H. Particular Christ, she can’t—can’t be dead. Holy Mary, Mother of God—

“So we got nothing,” Steve says, after they’ve all spilled their pieces, fallen into silence. He bends, picks up the coffee and has another good slug—cold, now. Christ, that’s awful. “We’ve got a bunch of puzzle pieces, with sides that don’t match up. We need more intel.”

“So that’s our next move,” Carter says, nodding once for punctuation.

Gather intel. Piece it together, find the—the shape of this thing they’re fighting. There’s five of ‘em, and Christ only knows how many Hydra mooks out there. Stack on all the SHIELD agents, and cops, and fuckin’ combined US military forces, taking orders from SHIELD now. From Hydra.

So they gotta be smart, gotta be rat-fink cunning. Gotta fight like the little guy.

“Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do,” Steve says.

*******

After—

After Clint and Carter go, head out into the night to start shaking trees, putting out hair-fine tendrils into the world to see what kinda fish bite, and Steve is standing at the kitchen sink eating probably-expired spaghetti cold outta the can, and watching Buck disassemble a sawn-off shotgun—

—and he’s so JB Barnes in this moment, standing at a kitchen bench and stripping down a shotgun, that Steve could fuckin’ cry.

That line of concentration that appears between his brows; the smooth steadiness of his hands as he coaxes the pieces apart, scrapes at a rusty patch with the end of one metal finger and—and he’s got the cleaning cloth draped over his left shoulder, flipped it there in a thoughtless kinda way that’s exactly how he used to, way the fuck back in the Thirties when he worked at the Krevanaks’ garage and always came home filthy, engine grease under his nails and worn into the tiny folds of skin in his palms and wrists and—

And Sam slips into the room, stands with his ass planted against the counter next to Steve, arms crossed. “You got a minute, man?”

“For you, pal,” Steve answers, shoves the fork into the half-eaten spaghetti and leaves it on the edge of the sink, follows Sam back outta the kitchen, across the barren waste of the living room into the far corridor—there’s a couple bedrooms down that side, bathroom around to the left, windows papered and boarded over. Bare bulbs in the roof, where the light sockets aren’t empty, gaping like toothless mouths.

“Your friend in there,” Sam begins, turning and standing at something like parade rest. “That who I think it is?”

“Sergeant James Barnes, US Army,” Steve answers. “It’s Bucky. Hydra had him, Sam. He fell—is that still classified? Fell off the side of a Goddamn bridge in the Austrian Alps, way the Hell back in ‘45. And he didn’t die, and then Hydra had him, and now he’s here, and God help me I got _no idea what I’m doing_.”

There’s a half-second silence, Sam frozen in place like a glitching movie projection while that sinks in, and then—

“Holy shit,” Sam says, thin and faint as spider silk. “Holy shit, brother. That’s heavy. That’s—” He stops, rubs a hand over his mouth, stares at the far wall.

“God _damn_. That’s a Hell of a thing. Bucky Goddamn Barnes. I guess—well. What does it—Hydra _had him_?”

“I mean, the Russians,” Steve says. “Department X. And then Hydra. And they scoured out his brainpan with electroshock to make him _compliant_ , and now he doesn’t even remember his own Goddamn name.”

“They—” Sam starts, stops. Closes his eyes for a couple heartbeats, takes a slow breath in, lets it out again.

Says at last, low and moonlight calm: “That is deeply, deeply fucked up. I don’t even know how— _shit_. How is he not dead? How is he not a vegetable? How is he not a hundred damn years old?”

“I think he’s a super soldier,” Steve says. “The real thing. Hydra, Zola, they were working on recreating the Erskine formula. Musta got something right."

“Jesus,” Sam says, and rubs at his mouth again. Takes another deep breath. “You sure it’s him? Not a—a clone, or a grandkid, or—”

“It’s him,” Steve says. “James Buchanan Barnes, born 10th of March 1918, late of Brooklyn and the Howling Commandos and a giant pain in my ass for most of my Goddamn life. It’s him.”

“Jesus,” Sam says again, and then—“Are you okay?”

Christ on a bike, but Sam is a better friend than Steve deserves.

And Steve is—

He’s okay like _Hell_. He’s running on the kinda exhausted hysteria that carried him through the Battle of New York, putting one foot in front of the other like an automaton, keeping his gaze locked on the job in front of him because if he goes off script, lets himself even look at—at Bucky, the Soldier, one-man walking minefield of murderous fuckin’ instincts and shards of memory, free of context, and he was the best fuckin’ man Steve ever knew and now—

—and—at the smouldering train wreck of Steve’s life, because no one is gonna trust him with _shit_ now, or ever again—they all know, what a freak he is, his flimsy fuckin’ tissues of lies falling away and—

—and Hydra is _everywhere_ , they’re in everything, helming the US military machine and watching through every camera on every street corner and everything is fucked up beyond all recognition, it’s _fucked_ —

“Sam, I—” Steve says, and he’s biting back the urge to keen like a kicked dog so his voice comes out choked and flat. He’s—

Jesus Henry Christ, he can’t do this.

He can’t be this fuckin’ selfish—they’re a Helluva long way outside of the regular chain of command, but all of these people are here because they followed Steve into the fire.

Which makes Steve the CO.

Which means he doesn’t get to fall apart at the seams, or spill all over Sam like he’s got a slow leak in some major artery. He’s gotta hold it together.

“I’m not okay, but that’s been my baseline since about 1937,” Steve says, and he cocks his mouth into a half-smile and rolls his shoulders back and forces the words to come smooth and level. “So, situation normal. I’m pissed off.”

“That’s fair,” Sam says. “You got some serious volume of traumatic shit to process there, man. Feeling complicated—feeling real fucked up about it—that’s about the most normal thing I’ve heard outta you all day. How about Barnes—you think he’s doing okay?”

Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

“I keep trying to tell him he’s free now,” Steve says. “I don’t think he’s getting it—like trying to tell one of those eyeless cave fish things about sunlight. And the Russians left a bunch of code words in his head, psychological programming, make him obedient. So until we can—get them out, fix up the inside of his head somehow—I’ve gotta stay on him. Keep him safe from Hydra, keep ‘em from getting him back, muzzled again. Theirs again. I don’t know what the Hell else to do, Sam.”

“Is he dangerous?” Sam asks, and—

Of course he’s gotta ask that. This is his job—this is literally his paid job, unlike Steve who gets paid to jump outta jet planes with a big metal frisbee and throat-punch goons with fuckin’ laser rifles.

Sam is doing his job, and he’d be Goddamn negligent to _not_ ask that question, and—

Bucky Barnes has tried to kill Steve twice in the space of the last week.

One round to the head and then a double-tap to the chest and abdomen of Steve’s Cap-illusion, in the loading bay at the hospital. And then fists and feet in the isolation cell under Ivy City. But that was—that wasn’t him, is the thing. His hands, his skillset and training, but—

But his song, his soul, is all saw blades and screaming, metal on metal on bone. But the inside of his head is all snarled-up coils of razor wire and old Russian programming—programming, like he’s a fucking _computer_ —and scar tissue, Hydra’s orders, _compliance_.

They’ve hurt him. They’ve hurt him so Goddamn bad and if Steve—if he gets hands on Pierce. On any of the _fucks_ that’ve been _handling_ him, putting him in that Goddamn chair—

Steve’s gonna salt some earth.

“About as dangerous as any of your shell-shocked vets,” Steve lies, level and beige like he’s reading outta the phone book. He is a sorcerer: there is power in saying the words, firm as the foundations of the earth like he’s gonna make it so by pure stubborn spite. “Only he’s more’n human strong, with a terrifying robot arm.”

“And Kurt Cobain hair,” Sam drawls.

“Speaking of,” Steve says. “The shower in this place—we got it working?”

*******

The shower works. Water doesn’t get a whole lot warmer’n piss, and the flow is patchy, but the shower works. There’s even a cake of soap in the bathroom cupboard.

And another Godawful rusty brown bloodstain, sunk into the grout of the tiles. Mold culture that could probably cure the bubonic fuckin’ plague in the shower stall.

Let’s be real: this is still better digs than Steve and Buck had for most of the Thirties. At least they don’t gotta share this bathroom with the three other families on the same floor.

Steve’s standards have fallen hard but it feels pretty close to bliss, rinsing the stink of old blood and sweat and puke off his skin, stepping into clean shorts outta his go bag.

Steps out into the hallway after and finds Buck on guard at the bathroom door, Clint’s P30 in his metal hand down at his side, watching up the corridor like he’s expecting a STRIKE team to pop the corner and spill into the hallway any second. Steve blinks hard, goes inside and _listens_ for—anything, songs that shouldn’t oughta be there, the drumming rhythm of war, combat, threat—

Nothing. Buck’s song, all bleeding-metal howl. Sam’s song from the front room, the whistle of air pressing on ear drums. Building song, rasping tune of plasterboard and brick, carpet, concrete, mold, the wail of electricity through the walls and deep-song of water in the pipes.

No threat.

Bucky is—maybe. Maybe—

Steve won’t give him orders, so maybe this is what he’s landed on. Follow Steve, throw himself at Steve’s enemies, watch his back when he’s vulnerable. Did they ever—the Winter Soldier was an assassin, not a bodyguard, but then—but then before he was the Soldier, he was JB Barnes.

“You’re up, pal,” Steve says, cocking his head toward the bathroom, the shower, and when Buck just stares for one second, two—“Here, I’ll stand guard,” Steve adds, holds a hand out for the gun. Buck stares for a heartbeat longer, and then he flips the safety on and hands the sidearm over and ducks into the bathroom.

Starts stripping off, brisk and pragmatic, shedding torn scrub shirt in mid-stride and dropping it in a heap to the tiled floor. Bares a good mile and a half of white skin and thick muscle and bone, the ladder of his spine and the mess of scarring around his left shoulder where metal meets skin—and Steve jolts, gets his shit together, hauls the bathroom door closed.

Jesus Christ, have mercy.

It’s maybe only a couple minutes before Buck emerges, wild around the eyes and hauling his filthy scrub pants back on, hair dripping wet on one side and bone dry on the other.

Fuck, whatever. Chalk it up as some kinda win: at least he don’t stink like the floor of a slaughterhouse anymore.

“Okay, Buck?” Steve asks, and Bucky makes eye contact with Steve’s left cheekbone and nods, crisp as a new dollar bill, and there’s a rattling purr of metal as the plates in his arm snap open and closed again like the gills of a fish, shedding droplets of water onto the threadbare carpet.

Mother of God.

“I got some clean stuff in my go bag, come on,” Steve says. Gets Bucky fixed up with clean undershorts and a T-shirt—Cap sized. They fit him well enough, with the added bonus of not being stained with dried-on brain fluid, and then—

There are a couple of single beds in the second bedroom, musty smelling, ugly stain across the fabric of one of the mattresses. It’s the work of a minute to rip the mattresses off the frames, cock the bed frames up against the wall and out of the way, mattresses down on the floor—

Steve sets up the tatty sleeping bag—Clint dug four of ‘em out of the hallway cupboard—on his mattress, slapping at the thermal fabric until he’s chased off the worst of the dust and—and then Buck is shoving his mattress into place, hard against the side of Steve’s bedding. Like they’re making up a double bed.

Like how they’d cram their bedrolls together, during the war. Like how they’d both end up sleepin’ on the couch cushions on the floor whenever Steve slept over at the Barnes’ house, when they were dumb kids.

And then he spends ten minutes taping a gun and three fuckin’ knives to the side of the mattress, in the hairline between the mattresses, squatting in the centre of the bedding and checking the sight lines to the door, to the boarded window—

“Okay, Buck?” Steve asks again, crawling into his sleeping bag.

“ _Da_ ,” Bucky answers, that frying pan-flat tone he uses whenever his brain skips over into the Russian dub, inspecting the edge of the serrated blade in his hand and then flipping it over and slipping it back into its duct-taped sheath on the side of the bed.

He takes his time settling—unzips the sleeping bag down the side, furious shift of thermal fabric rustling as he lies down, and then Steve can see his arm moving in the dark, finding the Glock at the head of the bed, drawing it, safety off, safety on, back in its jerry-rigged holster—

“Sweetheart,” Steve slurs, blurry like he’s been kicked in the head. “Sam’s on watch, okay? Need to rest, need you mission sharp.”

Bucky goes still as the grave, hands nested on his chest, and in the quiet Steve can hear him breathing, controlled sniper breaths, soft whir of his metal fingers shifting as he marks off the count on his knuckles.

*******

Waking and—it’s dark and warm and _good_ , syrupy sweetness, press of skin against Steve’s skin, humid human smell of sleeping bodies and there’s the solid press of a muscled thigh hard up against his swollen cock and it’s—

It’s _Bucky_ and—there’s a half-heartbeat insane rush of sunlight pouring over him: it’s Bucky, _his Bucky_ , warm and alive and here and Steve’s moaning and grinding in, hands grabbing clawed in a tangle of sleeping bag and T-shirt—

—and then he wakes up more and _oh God_ , it’s _Bucky_ , and he’s letting go and shoving back and—

“Jesus,” Steve blurts, halfway off the mattress, blinking and reorienting and—safe house, Philadelphia, maybe 4am. Bucky’s staring at him in the dark, whites showing around the grey of his irises, frozen like a hare waiting for the fox to pounce.

“Mother of—Buck, Jesus. I’m sorry.”

There’s a long moment of dead silence, no one even breathing, and then Buck uncoils, hand coming up from—from the side of the mattress. From the grip of one of his knives, blades taped in place and ready to draw.

Holy shit, how close did Steve’s _idiot dick_ come to getting him killed fucking dead—

“Sorry,” Bucky rasps, with a questioning kinda note in there, less like an apology and more like he’s reflecting Steve, like he figures it’s the thing to say when you almost stab your bedmate for humping your thigh at four in the morning. He brings his arms in and folds them across his abdomen, making himself small—or smaller, anyway.

“You’re okay,” Steve says. “That was my bad. I know better’n to grab at you without warning, pal.”

Another long silence, and then: “Okay,” Bucky repeats, toneless, lying still as a corpse, pale gleam of his eyes still fixed on Steve in the dark.

Steve eases forward again, back onto the mattress, awkward rustle of the sleeping bag—he’s legless, a mermaid flopping around on dry land. Settles in. It’s quiet again—subtle hum of something inside the arm recalibrating.

“I… I remember that,” Bucky breathes.

Steve—his stupid first instinct is to demand answers: _what_ does he remember, _how much_ , but—but this isn’t a Goddamn interrogation.

Any time Steve’s pushed Buck about what he remembers, he clams up—which makes sense. Remembering has meant pain for _decades_ now—back into that fucking chair, more electricity through his brain until he’s clean, a blank slate, Hydra’s perfect puppet soldier.

Jesus, how Goddamn brave Bucky is, just—to come out with it, whispered in the dark like he’s within the sanctity of the confessional.

He always was the braver of the two of ‘em.

“Okay, Buck,” Steve says, careful. “That’s—that’s good, sweetheart. I mean, you don’t _have_ to remember a thing if you don’t want to, if it don’t feel like you—I—I’m sticking with you even if you never—”

“Doll,” Bucky says, louder, cuts Steve off mid-ramble, “I _remember_ that.”

He’s reaching over, both hands, latching on around Steve’s hips and hauling him over like he’s a sack of spuds, pressing his thigh in again to find Steve’s groin, smooth like he’s got a tracking bug glued to his nuts—

“Shit,” Steve breathes, punched outta him, frozen and—and waiting, waiting to see where this train’s taking ‘em, because Buck’s holding it together with chewing gum and twine, brainpan fulla land mines, and Steve doesn’t wanna fuck this up.

Mother Mary, Queen of Angels, Holy Mother of God, _don’t let me fuck this up_.

“Like this,” Bucky rumbles, almost as still as Steve, hands light on his ribs, like he’s made it this far on muscle memory and now he’s off the edge of the map. “You were—I remember you like this. Before… Before I was deployed. We were like this.”

He reaches down with his human hand, down into Steve’s sleeping bag, finds the swell of his cock and cups it through the fabric of his boxers.

Steve sucks in a breath and locks everything down hard because his _stupid_ dick wants to just fuck into Bucky’s hand, all green lights, filling and pulsing and he _can’t_ , he cannot afford to—to abuse the trust Buck’s putting in him.

“Yeah. That’s right, sweetheart. We were like this,” Steve rasps. He’s watching Bucky’s face, the slight shifts of his features in the pre-dawn murk. He’s… curious, in the softening around his eyes, and—and confused, in the line of his jaw, the press of his lips together.

Thank Christ—thank Ulfadhir that Steve can read faces, can read the slightest tells—that Steve spent most of the formative years of his life staring at this mook’s face. Anyone else might not know what they were seeing, might not understand—and Steve’s looking for fear, or anger, but he’s not seeing ‘em.

Hasn’t stepped on any landmines yet.

Silence again—just the humming from Bucky’s arm, something buzzing like a beehive in his shoulder—and they’re not moving, Buck’s hand folded over Steve’s dick like he’s got no idea what happens next.

“Okay, Buck?” Steve asks, after a long moment.

“Yeah,” Bucky says, and his hand kinda—kneads at Steve’s groin, gentle, experimental. Steve takes a deep breath and blinks hard, grabs Buck around the forearm to anchor himself.

“Is this what you want?” Steve asks, voice coming shaky.

“I _remember_. We were like this,” Bucky says, brow shifting down, jaw working.

“Yeah, Buck. _A stór_ ,” Steve says, hips working forward and—no, _stop_ , inching back again. “That was—that was a long time ago. You don’t owe me anything. I mean, if you want to, you—but you don’t _gotta_ do anything with my johnson you don’t want to, if—”

“Christ’s sake,” Bucky mutters, and then he’s latching on, firm—pinch of the T-shirt over Steve’s ribs between the metal plates of Bucky’s hand—and hauling him in, again, closer, so they’re pelvis to pelvis and—and that’s Buck’s dick, warm through the fabric of his boxer shorts, pressing against Steve’s balls.

He’s not hard, not yet, but there’s heat pooling there, weight.

“Oh,” Steve says, like some kinda idiot, hand bouncing up from Buck’s arm to his shoulder, chest. Rolls his hips up and Bucky’s cupping and squeezing, and—the look on his face is determination now, and a shark-eyed flavour of satisfaction.

“Yeah,” Bucky says again, and his mouth is right there and—

And Steve ain’t put his mouth on another living soul’s since he came outta the ice.

He has fucking fangs, wolfish canines. He can get away with most flavours of sin in the dark if no one looks too close, but he can’t veil his Goddamn teeth if—touch is a dealbreaker, always.

He’s marked up some notches on his bedpost—no names and no numbers, lights off, gone before the sun rises. He’s sucked cock, worked tongue and lips over the slick wet of a girl’s—but he doesn’t kiss. Doesn’t—he can’t—

Steve drops his head down some, mouths at Bucky’s jaw, soft of his lips and tongue over the grit of stubble.

Grabs a handful of muscle and kneads at it like a cat, like—Jesus Christ on a cracker, Bucky’s built like someone sculpted his flesh from marble, like an anatomy textbook.

He’s always been beautiful—Steve lost hours of his youth drawing Bucky Barnes’ pretty fucking face, but he’s never been Goddamn _built_ like this, _solid_ like—

—like a cult of Nazis tortured him and cut him open and experimented on him for decades.

Fuck.

Oh _fuck_ , just—

“Doll?” Bucky mumbles somewhere overhead, checking in, and—

Steve’s frozen, gone rigid everyplace but where it counts. He’s starting to shake because—

—Jesus fuck, it’s not _fair_ , it’s not—

“It’s okay,” Steve lies, teeth clenched around it. Shifts back and down and presses, pushing, and Buck goes where he’s pushed, onto his back, meat hand slipping out of Steve’s shorts as he shifts. Steve leans in over him, shoves the tangled sleeping bag out of the way, cups Bucky’s dick through his boxers.

Still not hard, but he’s getting with the program—Steve can feel the throb of Bucky’s pulse against his fingers. He looks up, finds Buck’s eyes in the dark: he’s watching Steve’s face, studying.

“Think I remember the steps to this dance,” Steve says, pasting on a lopsided smile for him, and then he fishes in the front of Bucky’s boxers, draws his cock out through the fly, and drops his head to run his tongue over the crown.

Bucky hisses, short and sharp, goes utterly still—like he’s taking a shot, like he’s not even gonna let something as human as his pulse disturb his focus, and—and his dick _throbs_ , swells up to press against Steve’s lips.

Rest of him might not remember, but his johnson definitely knows the fuckin’ score, and Steve huffs and takes the head into his mouth, works lips and tongue over the sweet spots, works his way down.

Shudder of an out breath, slow and shaky, and Steve rolls his eyes up: Bucky’s watching him, watching his face, his mouth, wild eyed like he’s witnessing a terrible miracle, like he’s in pain. His jaw works, hands clenched into knots in the sleeping bag bedding, and he’s—silent.

Silent as the morgue.

This would—right about now, JB Barnes would be telling Steve his mouth oughta be illegal, invoking God and Jesus with every second breath, cussing fluent streams of poetry and nonsense and obscenity. Right about now the dam would break and you’d have to sit on his face to shut him up, but—but Hydra’s soldier is wordless, motionless, and Steve blinks hard, blinks _hard_ because Jesus fuck, he doesn’t wanna—quicksand of pain welling up through his chest, shoving ribs out to the side to fill him from the core.

Steve pulls off, heaves in a breath. “Yeah? Bucky? This okay?”

Bucky doesn’t—there’s no answer for one heartbeat, two, and Steve—he’s feeling that icewater tickle in his lower belly, the parachute-pull lurching of panic that he’s—he’s fucked this up, he’s—

—and then Bucky nods, blinking, his gaze darting from Steve’s mouth to his hand, his eyes, bouncing away and up to the ceiling and Steve—

Jesus, fuck. Just—just gotta—he opens, works the head of Bucky’s cock across the roof of his mouth and down again. Sucks him down deeper, head nudging at the back of his throat—back off half an inch and work his hand, taking up the slack for what he can’t get his mouth over.

Has his—has his dick actually got fuckin’ _bigger_ since Steve was last down here? How is that even… well, he’s bigger everywhere _else_ , muscle and bone, so—clearly it can happen.

Fucking _Hydra_ , just—hand up to meet his lips and down again, working the length, tongue and throat and palate working over what’s in his mouth, wet and messy and—and Buck’s hard now, all the way up and rigid as a line of rebar in Steve’s mouth. Steve’s tasting the salt-sweet of precome in flashes when he works his tongue over the head.

Whirr of the arm recalibrating and—and then the soft _buzz_ of fabric tearing and Steve rolls his eyes up again: Bucky’s torn the sleeping bag, torn the mattress, hands biting in on both sides. He’s pulling his hands outta the mess of shredded thermal cloth, fingers open and fisting and opening again like startled jellyfish, and the look on his face is—stricken, lost, pained, awed.

Steve goes down far as he can, reaches up with his spare hand and catches one of those startled jellyfish—it’s the metal hand, warm with stolen heat. Pulls it down and puts it on the top of Steve’s head, nesting silver fingers into his hair.

He’s looking Buck in the eye, clear and fierce as he can: _want this, want you here, want you with me_ —

Bucky rips the metal hand away, up and away, right up overhead to latch into the back of the mattress, and Steve blinks and then—sucks _hard_ , goes down _hard_ until he’s gagging and every line of muscle in Buck’s abdomen and thighs pull tight as garrotting wire, and then grabs the other hand, flesh hand, puts it in his hair again.

“Shit,” Bucky gasps, whisper-quiet and raw like something’s flayed open inside of him. Tries to pull away again and Steve reaches, catches his hand, nesting his fingers through Buck’s like they’re stepping out—hard slick of calluses over the mounds of his palm—

—and then Buck sucks in a breath and his dick is swelling, pressing against the roof of Steve’s mouth, spilling.

He’s silent, rigid, blinking wetly up at the ceiling, and his hand in Steve’s is limp, loose, like a puppet with the strings cut.

Steve swallows, works him through it, drinks him down, demanding. Pulls back up and off—Bucky’s still hard, his cock plum red at the tip—lets go of his dick and swipes at the spit on his mouth and chin, wipes his hand on the stained mattress.

Buck’s laying there, breathing slow and shallow sniper breaths again, pale eyes fixed still on the ceiling overhead. His hand in Steve’s is boneless.

Steve tugs at the fabric of Bucky’s boxers, gets him tucked away behind the fly again. His voice comes rasping, a bombed out shell: “Okay, sweetheart?”

No answer. Steady rise and fall of Bucky’s chest. Fuck.

“ _Soldat_?” Steve tries.

“You can’t—” Buck starts, still staring straight up, and his voice comes flat, dead. “You shouldn’ta done that.”

Steve blinks, breathes—this is: _Jesus_ , he’s talking back. He’s giving Steve backchat, he’s Goddamn _disagreeing_. This is _huge_ , this is—

“Your hand?” Steve asks.

“Your _head_ ,” Bucky answers.

“You weren’t gonna hurt me,” Steve says, solid, like he’s telling the world how it’s gonna be, like he can will Bucky back together by saying so—

“You shouldn’ta—the specs, on the weapon,” Bucky snaps. “I can—I’m remembering, Jesus, I—this hand. I can exert over a thousand pounds of pressure with this hand, punk, you can’t Goddamn risk—“

“You won’t hurt me, Buck.”

“Mother of _God_ ,” Bucky growls, and then he’s moving, both hands coming up to cover his face—ripple of pain over his features before he covers them. “You fuckin’ _want_ to die?”

“I used to,” Steve answers.

Bucky freezes for half a heartbeat and then parts his hands enough to look Steve in the—in the forehead, not quite in the eye.

“But it turns out I’m really Goddamn hard to kill,” Steve says. "And I got one or two kettles on the boil I gotta stick around for now.”

Bucky is very still for a moment, studying Steve through the gap in his hands. Then he drops his hands back to his sides, stares up at the ceiling, says: “If you—you can’t. You can’t die. You—”

He—twitches, one heaving shudder that shifts his whole body an eighth of an inch, settles again, still as a corpse. He’s milk-pale in the sliver of pre-dawn streetlight sliding in under the boards across the window, gaze hollowed out like he’s been scoured clean down to bones.

“They’ll steal me again. The handlers, Hydra. They’ll take steal me and put me in the—they’ll take it all away. They’ll take everything away again,” he grinds out. “I can’t—I—”

—and he’s hands up, meat and metal fingers cupping his skull and snarling in the tangled mess of his hair, clutching and squeezing and—and Steve reaches, grabs his hands and pulls them away. Strands of hair come with the metal hand, trapped in the joints of his fingers.

“Not gonna happen,” Steve snarls. “Okay, Buck? So help me God, I won’t let Hydra _touch_ you. I’ll burn them. I’m gonna burn everyone who so much as _looked_ at you,” and Bucky’s meeting his gaze, honest-to-God eye contact, blinking, mouth soft and open.

There’s a quiet moment, still, and then Bucky’s human fingers fold around Steve’s, slow, careful. Closes his mouth, face settling back into neutral.

“You ain’t doing too bad. For a new handler,” Bucky says, quiet as prayer, still looking Steve in the eyes, studying.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. “Still ain’t your handler, Buck,” Steve says.

A couple second pause, and then—“Right,” Bucky says, and then he’s pulling, gentle, tugging forward and down, and Steve folds forward, lets himself be drawn down to the mattress, snugged against Bucky’s right side, scarred human shoulder like a pillow under his head.

There’s a soft rustle in the dark as Buck reaches over the side of the mattress with the metal hand, comes back up with the serrated blade in his fist. Tucks it against his left thigh. Like it’s his fucking teddy bear.

“Okay?” Steve asks, lying still as a corpse. It’s like—God, between the both of ‘em, they’re a sack of nails snuggled against the side of a roll of razor wire.

Steve has—how long has it been since he’s let himself be soft with anyone? Not sex—sex is easy, sex is junk food easy, no kissing and the lights out so they can’t see his eyes, his scars. But this—the dropped-guard masks-off closeness. The intimacy.

It’s like he’s lost the muscle memory for how to do this.

Bucky huffs, turns his head so—so he’s burying his nose in Steve’s hair, and sighing, and Steve feels something crack and slow-spill warmth, low in his gut. Shifts his weight and puts a hand on Bucky’s chest, the curve of muscle and ribs.

Breathes in the human stink of sweat and come and breathes out and listens, Bucky’s song, slowed and blurred. Soft cries of seagulls in between the crunches of metal and bone.

*******

Not quite an hour later and Steve is coasting on the halfway line between sleep and waking and—and the music of the apartment shifts, slow and subtle. New threads weaving in: hooves over sawdust, the hum of cold wind pressing against your eardrums.

Clint is back.

Steve slithers out of the tangle of sleeping bags and torn mattress lining and Bucky’s Goddamn hair, moving careful and slow and near-silent and—and Buck’s awake, probably woke the second Steve started moving, pale eyes shining like silver dimes in the gloaming.

“Get s’more sleep if you can, pal,” Steve breathes. “I’m not going far.”

Clint’s in the living room, parking his ass on the sofa and hauling the antique fuckin’ coffee table over with one foot. He’s got—it’s like a tiny laptop computer, old and boxy and duct-taped across the back, wire-linked to a burner phone.

“I got her,” Clint says, setting up the computer and phone on the table, and there’s something wild around his eyes, hands shaking as he finger-pecks at the keyboard.

Sam prowls in from the kitchen, two mugs of the Godawful instant coffee in his hands, gives Steve a nod as he rounds the back of the couch.

“Who?” Steve asks Clint, and—

“Nat,” Clint says, immediate. “I’ve got Nat, she’s okay—hang on, here,” and then he’s shifting the computer a quarter-turn so Steve can see the screen, see the program booting up.

There’s a heartbeat of silence—and Sam puts one of the mugs down on the table at Clint’s elbow, stands back holding the other between his palms—and then noise spilling out of the computer speakers, tinny jangle of—it’s a telephone. Something like a telephone, anyway. Ringing once, twice, three times—

“ _Can’t leave you boys alone for five minutes, can I?_ ”

It’s Natasha’s voice, warm and smokey through the plastic distortion of the speakers, and Steve closes his eyes and puts his head back for a heartbeat and just breathes past the flood of sunlight bleeding out through the cracks in his chest wall, breathes through the wolf-urge to howl— _good hunting_ , _success_ , _reunion_.

Sweet Christ. Sweet fuckin’ Christ, _she’s okay_ —

Steve looks to Clint—teeth bared in a fierce grin, perched on the very edge of the sofa like he’s gonna leap up any second. Drops his voice, low and soft enough the computer’s mic won’t catch him: “This line secure?”

“Nat wrote the program,” Clint answers—which means yes. Secure, solid, take it to the bank. SHIELD, Hydra, are cordially uninvited to this conversation.

“Natasha,” Steve calls, stepping in closer and dropping into a squat next to the computer. “You coming home soon? Found a coffee shop in Brooklyn I think you’re gonna like.”

_Brooklyn_ is one of their code phrases—means no one is listening in at his end, no one’s got a gun to Steve’s head, no coercion and no compromise. Natasha’s answering phrase is—

“ _Jersey City_ ,” she says, cutting straight to the chase. “ _I’m in the air now. Maybe three hour flight time back to D.C. Listen—Fury sent me to the Fridge._ ”

“The Fridge?” Sam asks, eyes darting, trying to keep up, and—

“What’s at the Fridge?” Steve asks.

“ _A couple dozen hardened bad guys with weird enhancements,_ ” Natasha says. “ _And a vault full of weapons and artefacts too dangerous to leave out in the light of day. You wanna know what’s_ not _at the Fridge?_ ”

What’s _not_ at the—shit. Oh, _Jesus Christ_ —

“What’s gone?” Steve asks—what’s missing, what’s been taken—

“ _There’s a pretty good fake locked down in the back of the vault, but—if you’ve seen the real thing, been near it. It’s not just metal and stone, there’s—a weight. An intelligence. On paper it’s been in the Fridge since April, 2012. After the Battle of New York._ ”

God Almighty. Steve rears back, cold spilling like a raw egg cracked open in his gut, down and over his bowels and—and he’s aware of Clint going sniper-still, not even breathing. Jesus Harold Christ, not that—

“Natasha,” Steve rasps, and—

“ _It’s the sceptre,_ ” she says. “ _Hydra have Loki’s sceptre._ ”


	14. Chapter 14

It’s 9am and Steve’s standing with Clint in an industrial freezer in the back of some Godawful rundown coffee shop—

It’s a mob front, is what Clint tells him. He and Natasha had set this up between them, picked the time and place—somewhere off SHIELD’s radar, secure, controlled. Greek mob—some guy owed some other guy a favour, chits and debts passed around and weighed and exchanged until this debt had landed in Natasha’s hands—or one of her cover identities, maybe. Who the Christ knows—point is it’s safe, theirs for the next three hours.

The coffee is Godawful, like you might imagine at a shop that stays open for the sole purpose of washing dirty money. Tastes like burnt soil.

Steve is still drinking a triple-shot—needs the caffeine more’n he needs his taste buds.

The freezer is switched off, empty, all metal racks and shelving bare as picked-clean bones. Steel sides cut the street noise to almost nothing; means Steve can hear the music real clear, his own song and Clint’s, the song from the coffee—Clint’s got his own triple-shot, black and sugarless like this is his penance for some Godawful sin.

Song from the freezer itself, metal-song bright and angular and clear; the leftover humming notes from—food, cake and eggs and butter and milk, and Steve can follow the thread of music back, back, milk to cow, cows, the bovine rumble of their music and grass and sunlight and—

“You okay?” Clint asks, and Steve snaps all the way back into his skin. Into the here and now.

Christ, he’s tired.

“Yeah,” Steve says, has a healthy swig of coffee. “I’m golden. Time check?”

“Couple past the hour,” Clint says, having a slug of coffee himself and grimacing—he’d caught a couple hours’ shut-eye before they came here. They’re all on the bones of their asses, short on sleep and resources and ideas and—

There’s the scuff of—sneakered foot on concrete, a half-second warning and—and then the freezer door swings open and a woman steps in.

Brown hair in a high ponytail. Unremarkable kinda face, white, no makeup, tired. Jeans and a long-sleeved top and—

And the soaring song of tinkling piano, an impossibly high thread of wailing, the muted clap of silenced gunshots.

Natasha reaches up, peels away the photostatic veil over her face. There’s a couple heartbeats of silence, green eyes studying them both, as she puts the crumpled mask on a shelf to her right, and then—

“Nat,” Clint says, and it’s raw as flayed skin, broken open.

And then they both move at once, striding forward and colliding in the middle of the tiny space, hugging hard like they’re gonna leave bruises.

Natasha hugs like someone about twice her size, hauling Clint’s face into her shoulder, and the glimpse of her face Steve can see is—shock-pale, a tangle of grief and fury and relief dancing under the porcelain smooth of her professional mask.

“They _killed him_ , Nat,” Clint says, muffled against the press of her body.

“I know,” Natasha says, low and soothing as mother’s milk. “I know. And we’ll kill them back. I’m so sorry, Clint.”

“Coulson is—” Clint starts, stops. Steve can hear him breathing wetly, loud in the quiet of the freezer. He’s looking away, giving them whatever kinda privacy he can—knows better’n to believe any of the idiot gossip around SHIELD about the two of ‘em, their _office romance_ , but he does know they’re close as blood kin, and they’d both been friends with Coulson, and this is too damn intimate for his eyes.

“I know,” Natasha says again, and then there’s a long silence, broken by Clint’s harsh breathing, the soft scrape of sneakers over concrete as Natasha shifts her weight, the rustle of fabric, clothes moving over skin, letting go of one another and—

“Rogers,” Natasha says, and Steve looks around. Finds her inbound, prowling at him smooth as a hunting cat, and he’s half-braced for violence, a knife in the flank or one of her taser disks but then—

But then she’s hauling him into a hug too, fistfuls of the leather of—he’s wearing her jacket, the one he stole from her safehouse under Edgewood.

They’re more or less the same height when he’s like this, in his real body, toe to toe and the cold of her nose pressed to the skin under his ear and the hard shape of her holstered gun digging into his arm where it’s gone around her ribcage and then—and then she’s shoving back again, socking him in the shoulder.

“Alexander Pierce is telling the world you’re dead,” she says. “Again.”

“People keep trying,” Steve says. “Doesn’t seem to stick.”

“See, now I know you’re a fake,” Natasha says, her mouth quirked into a half-smile. “The real Steve Rogers would never pass up an opportunity to die.”

Clint makes a choked noise—some kinda mongrel cross between a laugh and a cough and a sob. Steve sighs and puts his head back to stare at the bleak sheen of the steel overhead. Christ on a crutch.

He can hear the smile in Natasha’s voice when she says: “Let’s talk strategy.”

*******

Natasha sheds her wig and steals Clint’s coffee, and they all park their asses on milk crates—in a disused industrial freezer, in the back of a mob coffee shop, in the low-rent part of Philadelphia—and talk strategy.

“Everything Hydra’s got now, it rests on a lie,” Steve says. “The lie that Hydra is in retreat, and SHIELD has been scrubbed clean. Which means—the truth comes out, it all falls down. Unless they’ve got another play still to make.”

“And we don’t know their play,” Natasha says. “We know they’ve got the sceptre, we know they’ve got some HammerTech weapons, we know they’ve set a whole bunch of wheels in motion to take control—there’s gotta be an endgame.”

“Okay, so—” Clint reaches over, steals his coffee back from Natasha, has a big slug. “So we need inside of Hydra.”

“We need inside of Hydra,” Natasha says, nodding, and her gaze goes to the back wall, goes distant—laying it out in her mind, puzzle pieces and possibilities and—

“The Triskelion?” Clint asks. “Pierce, Rumlow, Sitwell, they all operate outta there. We get inside, find someone with an evil squid necktie—”

“We don’t,” Steve says. “I do.”

The argument is short, clipped and tight, because Clint is one Hell of an infiltrator, and Natasha is probably the single best interrogator in the world, but Steve—

“How long does it take to program that thing?” Steve asks, pointing at the photostatic veil—a slip of plastics and micro-wires, still sitting crumpled on the fridge shelf like a used condom. “And you need, what—a whole computer set up? Photos? From a bunch of angles, to create the whole face? I can look like anyone, I can do it now—”

—and he does, quick and sloppy seemings over his face like he learned to do when he was a kid, makes himself look like Clint, like Jasper Sitwell, like the kid working the front counter of the coffee shop, pale and muttering and staying the Hell outta their way. Cycles through the faces, fluid, thoughtless, still talking: “I can get anywhere, look like anybody. It’s gotta be me.”

“That is _disturbing_ ,” Clint mumbles into his coffee.

“And you guys are gonna be busy,” Steve continues. “You’ve got the other flank to hit.”

Fury, Nicholas J. And Maria Hill, his second-in-command. Last seen going into a private meeting with Pierce in the Triskelion.

And they’re not dead—can’t be dead, or Pierce and Hydra would be shouting it from the rooftops, making them out to be martyrs for the cause of freedom.

Like they’re doing with Coulson.

So they’re alive, and off the grid, and what they know—what they know could bring the whole house of cards down.

“If we can find ‘em before Hydra does.” Clint is picking at the paper of his empty coffee cup, fidgeting with blunt fingers, tearing the outer layer of the cardboard away in one long strip.

“I can find them,” Natasha says. “There’s a protocol—it’s old. Might take a while to establish contact—but if they’re alive, and they want to be found, I can find them.”

*******

When they spill out the back door into the alley behind the shop, blinking fast against the hard grey sunlight filtering down through cloud and brick and buildings overhead, Natasha has her wig and mask back on, and Steve and Clint are under seemings.

No one goes anywhere with their own face on—there are too many cameras, too many electronic eyes, on ATMs and mobile phones and street corners, in the fronts of shops. And SHIELD can look through any of them. All of them.

Steve fishes in the pocket of his jeans, hauls out his burner phone, jams the battery back in and waits for it to boot up, scrolls to the first saved number— _notorious jbb_ , because Sam set the phones up—and dials.

Lets it ring once, hangs up.

Shoves the phone back in his pocket—it chirps, briefly, a single ring and then silence in reply. Means _confirmed_ , means Bucky will be packing down his sniper’s nest on a rooftop, tattered sleeping bag and the best rifle outta Clint’s weapons cache, from where he’s been watching the front of the coffee shop, watching the street and the flow of traffic.

Natasha is watching, head cocked. “Your driver?” she asks.

“Our other refugee from the Forties,” Clint answers.

Natasha blinks, and then—“Barnes?” she asks, and her eyes dart—skyline, rooftops, looking for snipers.

“Five blocks that way,” Steve says, nodding casually to the north—resists the idiot urge to flip a salute in Bucky’s direction. Telling God and the enemy and all the world exactly where your marksman is hiding is what you might call a dumb move.

“So he’s… functional?” Natasha asks.

Steve grimaces. “Functional is about how you’d describe it, yeah.”

He talks her through it as they walk back to the truck—parked a couple streets over, draped under a seeming of a dog wash company van. Bucky’s trigger words—Russian, probably held over from the Red Room—his silence, his murderous competence, his—the way he’s latched onto Steve like he’s hanging off the edge of a cliff by his Goddamn fingernails, like Steve is—

“I keep telling him I’m not his handler,” Steve says. “I don’t—I don’t know if I’m making any ground, with that.”

Natasha has her head cocked, listening, her eyes—they’re a smudged shade of brown, with the photostatic veil over her face—eyes half-narrowed. She’s—Natasha is—if anybody knows Goddamn anything about getting deprogrammed, getting _okay_ , for—for a given value of okay, anyway—

“So you’re his CO,” Natasha says.

“I—yeah, but—but it’s more’n that. I don’t—I don’t think he’s capable of refusing an order.”

“Are you gonna order him to burn down a hospital, or suck your dick?”

Jesus _Christ_ have mercy.

“ _No_ ,” Steve whisper-screams, wolfish yelping cry startled outta him like she’s stuck him with a sewing needle. Holy Mary, Mother of _God_.

If Natasha finds out about last night, about—she’ll kick Steve square in the head. And he’ll deserve it, too. Of all the dumbass moves he coulda—

“Then you’re doing okay,” Natasha says, drawling—she’s got her hands in her pockets, a sloping kinda prowl, and Steve remembers her talk about finding him under an illusion because he always moves the same way. “There’s no manual for this, Rogers. And these aren’t exactly ideal circumstances. Just—pretend you’re his CO and don’t ask him to commit any war crimes.”

“I’m not asking him to do _anything_ ,” Steve mutters—because he’s not, he’s so Goddamn careful to skirt around saying anything that could kinda maybe be an order if you held it up to the light. It’s like having a _geas_ all over again, watching everything he says and—

And Natasha is studying him, mouth quirked. She’s silent for a long moment, and then—“You’re doing okay,” she says again.

If it’s a comforting lie, Steve’s not gonna turn it away.

Back to the truck and they pile in—Steve hooks the seemings he and Clint are wearing into the bigger illusion over the truck, stapling the spells together in his head like errant sheets of paper so there’s fewer moving parts—and then Steve stands leant against the open door at the curb and pretends to dick around on his phone until he hears the wailing song of steel and bone cutting, the faintest thread of brassy trumpet notes, beneath the white-noise hum of a veil.

Waits until that song has slipped past him, into the car, and out of the corner of his eye he can see the worn seat leather shifting under an invisible weight—and then Steve raps on the roof of the truck with a closed fist, climbs in after Bucky, hauls the door closed.

“Okay, Buck?” Steve asks, tugging at the loose thread of sorcery in the back of his head until Bucky’s veil falls away, uncovers him sitting sprawled in the bench seat, old jacket and too-big jeans—they’re all dressed in a blend of clothing bin donations and Walmart couture today—and the tatty sports bag with his packed-down rifle in his lap.

“Yeah,” Bucky rasps, toneless, and that’s—it’s English, which is a good start. English, and spoken aloud, in front of other people. Sure, it’s one single word, but it’s better than—

“No complications,” Bucky adds, and it’s like fuckin’ Christmas morning up in here. Three words at a stretch.

Steve is so far out of his fuckin’ depth here, he ain’t seen dry land in weeks.

There’s a couple heartbeats of silence—Buck is staring at Natasha, and she’s watching him in her passenger-side mirror, like a pair of stray cats sizing one another up to decide if they gotta fight or fuck or ignore one another with all of the dignity of the King—Queen, the Queen of England.

And then Clint kicks the engine over and they pull out into the traffic.

The quiet stretches out like taffy, block after block, ten minutes and then fifteen and then—

Steve’s never been much of a talker, and Clint is too mired in grief and exhaustion to throw any kinda casual banter around and—and Natasha and Buck are both splitting their time between studying each other and studying the traffic, the flow of cars around and past ‘em.

Honk of horns, gasoline grind of the engine and hum of tyres over tarmac and—and they’re on the highway now, burning swift for home, for Clint’s Godawful safe house—and the endless patter falling from the radio, police radio channel rattling over the unit duct-taped to the front dash of their stolen car.

“ _Ten-fifty, Rising Sun and West Erie_ ,” the radio mutters, and Steve turns that over in his head for half a second—ten fifty is—traffic stop? No, an accident—

“So, how about that local sports team?” Natasha asks, loud and bright, and Steve looks over at her and—

And in the door mirror next to her head, Steve sees the black armoured SWAT truckmerge into the highway traffic, three cars behind them.

“Shit,” Clint spits, hands clenching convulsively around the steering wheel.

It’s—there’s three now, four, hauling from the on-ramp into the flow of the highway. Heavy duty, armoured for anything short of a direct missile hit. SWAT use trucks like that, in the big cities.

So does STRIKE.

“Jesus—hang on to something,” Clint says, setting his shoulders and stepping down on the accelerator—growl of the motor churning faster, meaner, and—

“ _Hold_ ,” Bucky says—he’s watching the STRIKE trucks in the rear view, slouched low in his seat, grey eyes bright and clear. “Don’t draw ‘em, don’t—just hold.”

“They’re not here for us,” Natasha adds. Her voice has bled corpse-cold, utter blade-edge focus and—and she’s sitting same as Buck is. Low in her seat, not turning to look back or leaping up in the seat or doing much of anything.

Steve was a wolf for most of two decades. You move fast, jerky, sudden: you draw the predator’s gaze.

“Shit,” Clint breathes again—and he eases off the accelerator. Breathes out, slow and shaky.

Steve can see Clint’s eyes in the rear view mirror, darting around—the cars in front, around them, the armoured trucks behind. Over to Natasha. Trusting her, taking his cue from her—“You sure?”

“They wanted us, they’d already be fucking us,” Bucky says, flat and drawling—and he never—this is—

This is what it takes to get the Winter Soldier to open his mouth and say something, say anything, unprompted. A threat assessment.

Steve is—he’s rummaging in the back of his head, going through the threads of spells that he’s hanging onto. Like he’s got a half dozen stroppy dogs hanging offa leads and pulling in all directions—here, this one, this—the gleam of gloss paint over metal, taste of tire rubber loitering at the back of his tongue—

“The seeming is good,” he says, louder and flatter’n he means to, concentrating on the feel of—“The illusion. Over the truck. It’s solid. They can’t have spotted us.”

“They haven’t found us,” Natasha says, and she’s holding that deliberately casual slumped pose but her eyes in the rear view are bright, bright as welding sparks, and—

—and the STRIKE trucks have pulled into the far left lane and are gradually easing up and past. Moving fast, faster than the speed limit but not—not aggressive, not—

This isn’t an ambush.

Just a dog wash van over here—purple and block-shaped and _nail clipping free with every service_. Nothing to see here, just—just sharing the road, just heading the same way—

“Where are they going?” Steve asks, shatters the tense silence in the car like the Hulk’s fuckin’ fist through a cement wall.

There’s another long silence—mindless drone of their truck’s engine grinding away like white noise, and they all watch the ink-black SWAT convoy—moved up and past them, now, powering on, swift and smooth and predatory, past exit after exit because—

“They’re going where we’re going,” Clint says, strangled flat like he’s gotta choke the words out.

And— _fuck_.

Steve heaves his ass up enough to get at his phone, hauls it outta his pocket and fumbles into the address book and dials—second entry on the four-item list, _coolest guy you know_ , and there’s the electronic purr of simulated bells ringing—

“Son of a _bitch_ ,” Clint snarls—

—ringing once, twice, three times, and then—

“ _This is Wilson_ ,” comes Sam’s voice, clipped and level.

“Rogers,” Steve answers. “Bug out, now. Personnel and whatever you can carry. You got Hydra inbound. Is Carter there?”

“ _Yeah, she’s—_ shit, shit _—she’s sleeping, hang on_ ,” Sam says, and Steve can hear the tread of booted feet on carpet, bang of a door opening, and then Sam’s voice again, half muffled: “ _Sharon—evac, now. We’re bugging out, company’s coming_.”

“ _Ahh, God_ ,” Carter answers, voice muffled by sleep and distance, and then Steve hears the thud of feet hitting the floor, more stamping of booted feet—

“ _What’s the ETA_?” Sam asks, loud like his mouth is suddenly much closer to the phone, and—background of banging and scraping kinda noises, getting their shit together.

They were prepared, gear stowed and ready for this, because they’re fighting a guerrilla war against a paramilitary intelligence agency with global reach and there was always a chance this was gonna go to shit but—

But it shouldn’t have happened _this soon_.

They’ve taken precautions. No one leaves the apartment with their own face on—not faces, not ears, not fuckin’ hair, not a single inch of bare skin without one of Steve’s seemings painted over it. They’re using burner phones, disposables, all bought from different stores. They dumped their first car, stole a new one, small hours of this morning, and—

And they’ve been operating outta that apartment for less’n twenty-four hours.

How the _Christ_ did Hydra find them?

“Clint,” Steve raps out. “How long’ve they got?”

“Ahh,” Clint says, and his eyes dart, take in the highway road signs, their location, how fast they’re going, how fast the STRIKE vans are going, pulling away into the distance up ahead. “Six minutes.”

“You hear that?” Steve asks Sam, and—

“ _Six minutes_ ,” Sam repeats, voice sounding—strained, like he’s moving fast or lifting something heavy or—but level. Calm.

He’s a Goddamn professional, for all that he got out of the game. Knows to keep your weapons to hand and your bags packed and your boots on when you sleep, and this ain’t his first rodeo.

“ _Solid copy on that. Evac to alpha point?_ ”

“Confirm, alpha point,” Steve replies. “Good luck, pal.”

There’s a heartbeat of quiet, and then—“ _Wilson, out_ ,” Sam says, and the call cuts to silence.

“So this went cluster-shaped faster’n usual,” Clint drawls—he’s accelerating, now that STRIKE are outta sight. Still sticking with the speed limit—last thing they need is cops up their ass—but driving faster, meaner, lightning-quick flash of indicators before he jumps into the next lane and jams his foot down harder. “Question is, where’s the hole in our protocols? How did Hydra find us?”

“How indeed,” Natasha murmurs, and Steve catches her gaze in the rear-view again, her eyes fixed on Buck and—

And Bucky is staring back, watching her like a Goddamn hawk watching prey. His metal hand is open, loose in his lap, but his human hand is clamped tight around—around something in the sports bag.

Easy money on—it’s a weapon. One of the guns out of Clint’s cache, or that big fuckin’ knife he’s gone and pack-bonded with.

Jesus Christ, of course they—there’s a leak. Somewhere in the system, there’s a leak—and that’s the easiest answer, the most obvious answer. That someone in their five-man army is feeding intel back to Hydra. And of course they’re looking at each other.

Mother of _fuck_ —

“Alpha point,” Steve rasps, leaning up to talk to Clint—and if he sticks his head through, breaks up their Goddamn staring contest, that’s just a happy fuckin’ coincidence—“We gotta get there yesterday.”

*******

Alpha point is a cab rank four streets over from their apartment block. The street’s all bars, Irish-themed pubs, a sex shop at the top corner, and the cab rank is about halfway down the drag. It’s the kinda spot you wouldn’t look outta place, milling around, just waiting for your ride, but also—

It’s a low-traffic area. During the day, anyway. Minimises the number of civilians in the firing line if this all goes to shit.

More shit, anyway. Deeper shit.

They pull up to the cab rank—no one on the street. Some guy smoking under the awning of the pub, a couple doors down, but other’n that there’s nobody home.

Shit. Steve fumbles in his pocket, pulls out the burner phone again, dials Sam’s number, lets it ring once and then hangs up.

They’ll have to dump these phones and start over again, after this—if Hydra knows they’re here, they’ll know to monitor traffic on local cell towers, and once they sift through all the noise and the junk, they’ll find Steve’s call to Sam’s number, narrow in on these phones, like tiny tracking devices everyone voluntarily carries pressed to their asses.

He looks up again, studying the street, shop fronts and graffiti and the bleak faded black of the tarmac.

Movement—two fellas emerging from one of the pubs up the road, and Steve—squints, because _fuck his useless fuckin’ eyesight_ , and how is it he can cure a broken spine with his sorcery but he still doesn’t have eyeballs that work to spec after seventy fuckin’ years and—

It’s them. Nondescript clothes in various shades of neutral and dark, illusion faces borrowed from guys dead fifty years or more, and the matching gas station caps on their heads—anchors for Steve’s seeming spells. They’re both wearing backpacks, and one of ‘em is carrying a bigger sports bag in one hand.

Steve tugs at the threads of his own seeming in the back of his head—checking, reinforcing—intact, which means disguised, hidden, which means—he jams the phone back into his butt pocket and heaves open the door of the truck and jumps out, boots on the ground, prowls up the sidewalk to meet them.

“That you?” one of them asks, when he gets within shrieking distance—it’s Sam, Sam’s voice, spilling out from the face of Jim Hoare, the guy who’d been foreman down at the docks when Bucky first started working there a little less’n a century ago. “Tell me that’s you, I don’t know what anybody looks like anymore. I am not cut out for this spy shit, man.”

“It’s me,” Steve confirms. “You got out clean?”

“Maybe a minute before STRIKE got there,” Carter says—and ain’t that a head spin, hearing her crisp alto voice coming from what looks like the solidly built Army quartermaster, Italian front in ‘44—he’d had a significant kinda moustache and a Jersey accent that only got thicker when he was giving Steve grief for losing his boots, again, for maybe the sixth or seventh time—

“They’re setting up roadblocks in every direction, had the whole block locked down. That was—” She looks down, at her left wrist—bare, hairy—and a flicker of irritation crosses her masked face. If she’s got a watch on, it’s tucked away under the seeming. “About seven minutes ago.”

They’re hustling, moving for the truck—for the dog wash van, looks like, from here outside the illusion: royal purple with a cartoon dog design blazed up the side. Steve folds in and moves with ‘em, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets and trying to walk like anybody other’n himself.

“Leave anything behind?” Steve asks, hunching his shoulders and looking around, casual-like, looking for cameras, for witnesses, for enemy action—battered green shamrock design painted on the inside of shop-front glass, concrete and steel and stone and—

“Nothing sensitive,” Sam says. “Some dirty jocks. Maybe half the weapons cache. No meaningful intel.”

Their dirty Goddamn undershorts, Hydra is welcome to. Might find some fingerprints, some hair, if they go through with the black light, which—wait. Wait, what about—

“Sam,” Steve says, stopping mid stride so hard he almost trips on his feet. “Sam, they—your family.”

“What?” Sam asks, stopping, turning, and his face is—the seeming painted over his face is all blank confusion, slow-seeping floodwater rise of fear—

“Your fingerprints,” Steve says. “They—you’re a government employee, they’ll be on file. Hydra is gonna know you’re with us. You’ve gotta get your family to go to ground, you’ve gotta warn them—”

“ _Shit_ ,” Sam spits, and then—“I—oh, shit. _Shit_.” He drops the sports bag, lets it fall dead weight to the sidewalk—crunch of metal and plastic—and then he’s groping at his pants pocket, fumbling, hauling out his burner phone.

Steve surges forward, grabs up the bag—Christ on a crutch, that’s heavy. Awkward hard curve of Steve’s shield, crammed down the side, distorting the fabric shape of the bag. Keeps moving, into Sam’s personal space, closer—

“Move, pal. Keep moving,” he says, low and tight. Heaves the bag across his shoulder and keeps moving, keeps steering, and he can’t _shove_ at Sam to get him moving in the right direction, not without tearing both their seemings—but Sam gets the message, starts moving out again for the truck, clumsy like his feet have bled numb and staring at his phone, tapping in a string of numbers with his thumb.

Jesus wept—his family. Mom and a younger sister.

It was safe enough for ‘em, when Sam was only maybe peripherally involved, a name and number saved on the phone of Steve Rogers, fugitive. It’s another thing if—if Sam’s _with_ them, leaving fingerprints on their safe house counter and hairs in the shower drain, a fugitive too.

An enemy of Hydra.

Makes Sam a target. Makes his family targets.

“Come on,” Steve is saying, and then they’re alongside the truck, and he’s passing the heavy-as-fuck sports bag over to Sharon—and she’s shoving it over the back seats, into the trunk—and then Sam clambers in, grabbing for the edge of the seat like a blind man and pressing the phone to his ear and—

“Mom?” Sam starts, and his voice comes thin, distorted like radio signal matted and twisted by distance, and—

Runners home. Sam and Sharon are both in the truck—and Buck, and Natasha, and Clint.

Steve hauls the cab door closed, slams his fist down on the roof—and shoves the new seeming spell out and through, purple to white, makes the truck into a panel van, white and rust and mud smeared up the wheel wells, dotted across the number plates.

“Move out,” Steve yells, stepping back from the truck, back up over the sidewalk, and he looks through the front cab window, looks Clint dead in the eye so he knows—“Go, go _now_.”

And then Steve slaps a hand on his sternum, pinkie fingertip digging at his lowest dermal piercing, and activates his quick-deploy walking veil.

Growl of the motor, surging, and past it Steve can just hear Natasha’s voice, her cry, “ _Rogers—_ ”

—but Steve has turned away, boots pounding sidewalk, cutting north. Walking away, because they need to get _outta here_ , and he needs to—

And then the truck flies past, makes a sloppy u-turn and—and Clint guns the engine and they’re outta here, hauling ass. Getting clear.

Steve listens to the rumble of the truck’s engine as it pulls away. Doesn’t look back.

He’s got a job to do, the kinda job only he can do, and he can’t—can’t let himself—

Cell phone rings in his back pocket. Chirping, insistent, loud—Jesus, was it always this loud? Steve fishes it out— _bow and arrow guy_ , the text shimmying around on screen.

This is stupid—Hydra is gonna start sifting through all the local cellphone tower traffic, if they’re not doin’ it already. This is a stupid fuckin’ risk.

“What,” Steve answers, flat as an ironing board.

“ _You’re going inside_ ,” Natasha says, clipped, tight.

“No time like the present,” Steve replies.

This was always the plan. Find Hydra, crawl up their asses, bleed ‘em for intel. Hydra coming to them just shaves down the timeline.

“ _Makes sense_ ,” Natasha says, and Steve can just imagine her head tilt, the cock of her eyebrow. “ _There’s just one small detail you forgot_.”

And then—muffled sounds, fabric moving against the cell phone mic and a low scrape and then—

Breathing. Low enough Steve can just hear it past the white noise of the truck engine in the background, past the ambient noise of city and traffic, cars honking and the very edge of Sam’s voice, distant—

Silence.

“Bucky,” Steve says, rasping, because he— _shit_.

Steve feels like the worst kinda criminal, doing this. He feels like the scum of the earth. But this—he needs to do this. And he needs to keep Bucky the Hell away from Hydra, keep Buck safe from—from every Goddamn tripwire Hydra or the Goddamn Red Room laid down inside his head.

And sometimes that’s gonna mean—

“I’m sorry, pal,” Steve says. “I’m sorry, I—I gotta do this. This is the mission. I’ll be—if I’m not at the rally point in three hours, you can—”

Stops. Breathes, shaky, because—what the fuck is the end to that sentence? Three hours is a long Goddamn time—if this goes to shit. If Steve doesn’t make it to the rally point, because Hydra’s got him locked up in a ten-by-ten cell, or because Steve’s too Goddamn dead to make it anywhere—

They won’t even know where to start looking for him. What the Hell is Buck gonna do if Steve’s not—

Shit—come on, man. Keep breathing.

“Stick with Clint, okay?” Steve says. “He’ll know what to do.”

Silence on the line for a few seconds. Steve keeps walking, darts across the street, pushing north.

Back to the safe house. To the STRIKE teams, and Hydra—he can see the hazard tape strung across the road ahead, their roadblock in place, ugly boxy black of one of the SWAT trucks beyond it. And then—

“ _Da_ ,” Bucky rasps, and—Jesus Christ. Again with the Russian.

Steve has—this is a Goddamn cowboy move. If it were one of his men doin’ this shit he’d be hauling ‘em over the coals for it, but—but there wasn’t time to argue it out, come to consensus, draw some fuckin’ diagrams to explain what he’s gonna do so everyone can give full and informed consent.

This was always the mission—and right now, in the field, a bunch of Hydra goons spread out over unfamiliar terrain—there’s never gonna be a better opportunity.

“You’ll be okay, pal,” Steve says, and thank Christ he’s veiled because he can’t stop his mouth from twisting, grimacing at the taste of the lie. “Sweetheart. We’ll be okay.”

*******

Roadblock, hazard tape strung across the street and one of the SWAT trucks parked just beyond, catty-corner across the asphalt—and another truck parked square across the front door, locking down the whole apartment block.

Gonna be another truck covering the back door, back alley—Steve has done enough ops with STRIKE to know how they operate, how they do business.

And it _is_ STRIKE—not SWAT, local cops. It’s SHIELD.

Steve knows that—that martial song, droning rhythmic parade ground march. Hears it in every SHIELD installation, the particular group intelligence of the organisation given voice in Steve’s head. In his inner ear.

Shouldn’t have taken him this long to realise—

Realise how much SHIELD’s song sounds like Hydra.

There are goons milling around the trucks, rifles and stun batons and black tactical gear. Armour, helmets. Goons moving down the side alley, goons in the front foyer, locking down the piece-of-shit lift and starting to clear the stairwell.

Steve holds tight to his veil—like he’s holding the edges of a blanket together, keeping the bite-cold of a Brooklyn winter away from his skin, his flesh and bone and phlegm-wet chest. Holds his veil locked in place and walks past ‘em, past the goons in the foyer and in the stairwell and up, up—

Fifth floor and out into the hallway and—last door to the left is the apartment, Clint’s safe house. Door is open, splintered at the jam where they’ve forced it, and there are STRIKE assholes at the door, two of ‘em, rifles up, and inside—

“We missed them,” Rumlow is snarling, slapping an empty peaches tin off the kitchen counter.

Goddamn Brock Rumlow.

Phil Coulson named _names_ , named Hydra, _died_ to get the word out, all over SHIELD’s servers. And one of those names was Rumlow.

And he’s _here_ , like it ain’t even a thing. Like no one ever dropped his name and the word _Hydra_ in the same breath. Like he’s still an agent in good standing, and not a traitor. Not a lying sack of shit.

Means these guys—they’ve _all_ gotta be Hydra.

This is—at least three STRIKE teams. This is a whole lotta assholes.

“Bed’s still warm,” comes another voice—another STRIKE guy, spilling out from the hallway and hauling up to stop next to the sofa. It’s Kelvin, STRIKE Alpha, smear of freckles visible above the fabric of his mask. “They’ve gotta be close.”

Rumlow snaps to attention like a bloodhound scenting prey, grabs for the comms piece in his ear.

“STRIKE Charlie—widen the perimeter to five blocks. Scramble local PD to hold the roads. Nothing gets in or out without our personnel sayin’-so.” Pause, breath, and then: “Umber, patch through to digital ops and tell ‘em to widen their bubble. I want our eyes on every camera for a three klick radius.”

Mother of _Christ_ , that’s a lot of cameras. Which means a lot of eyes, and they’re all taking orders from Rumlow like it’s business as usual, so—

So they’ve gotta be Hydra, too. Every single son of a bitch working digital ops for this raid—enough eyes to monitor live feed from hundreds, maybe thousands of cameras.

They’ve all gotta be Hydra.

Jesus _Christ_.

Jesus Christ, this is—how _fuckin’ many_ —just how much of SHIELD is rotted clean through?

This ain’t just a conspiracy. This ain’t just Pierce and a few close pals, this is—

“Looks like a meth lab’s ugly cousin in here,” another squid fuck declares, casually poking the end of his stun baton through a fist-sized hole in the living room wall. “We sure this is the right place?”

“Carter gave us this intel,” Rumlow answers, mouth twisting into a half sneer as he turns in place. “And she couldn’t lie to us if you put a gun to her head.”

What the—oh, Jesus—

Steve is distantly aware that he’s frozen still as a shop mannequin, stood in the middle of the ugly fuckin’ living room and staring fixed at a tear in the wallpaper like it’s God’s own handwriting.

_Carter_. _She couldn’t lie to us_ —Holy fuckin’ Christ, oh God, it’s—

He’s reinforced his walking veil five fuckin’ times in the last twenty seconds, compulsive, because it’s all he can do to just—hold it together, just hold your shit together and maybe breathe a couple times and Rumlow’s smug idiot voice keeps looping through Steve’s brain like the needle on the turntable skipping, skipping— _Carter gave us this intel. Gun to her head_.

“Anyway—” and Rumlow’s still talking, sneering, tugs a handgun outta where it’s taped under the kitchen counter. “You think meth dealers woulda left any of their toys behind?”

And—

“Fuck,” Steve breathes, and then: “ _Fuck_ ,” he barks, the veil his only saving grace, and his hands are convulsing into fists and open again, spine lighting up like someone’s dragging a white-hot poker up from from tailbone to nape.

Carter. _Sharon Carter_. She’s the leak.

Hydra have something on her—which means every Goddamn thing they’ve done in the last twenty-four hours, Hydra know all about it.

Buck, Sam, all of ‘em—they’re _with her_ right now. And wherever she goes, whatever she knows, Hydra are gonna know it too, and—

Jesus _fuck_.

Steve fumbles in his ass pocket, hauls out his burner phone and opens up the messaging app with shaking hands. Takes half a step to the right to get outta the way of some STRIKE asshole, striding through the room and back out the front door and—

Rumlow is issuing orders, a search of the stairwell and the other apartments, search patterns for the surrounding streets, and Steve is half-listening and half—

_found that leak in unit 13_ , he types, mushing at the tiny fuckin’ buttons like he’s in his Cap body and subtly too large for everything he touches, like a toy soldier dropped into kid sister’s dainty dollhouse.

Picks Clint’s number, Sam’s number outta the list and hits send.

Natasha—Natasha will—if they haven’t dumped the cell phones yet. Natasha will know what to do with—with that whole fuckin’ can of worms.

Steve’s gotta keep both eyes up and focused front.

Movement—Rumlow is moving out, stalks past and back outta the apartment. Steve pivots and follows, close on his heels, close enough to smell that Goddamn pine-scented deodorant Rumlow always uses.

Reinforces his veil for the millionth time and cracks his knuckles and—

He needs to run a test. Needs to—back into the stairwell and clattering down the stairs, heading for the street—needs to try somethin’, figure out just what _kind_ of fucked they are.

Needs to put his game face on. Her game face.

*******

Street level, and STRIKE are working their way out from the centre of the circle, from the apartment block, fanning out through the streets and alleys, through neighbouring buildings, businesses and homes, pounding on doors and—

—and they’re working in teams, in fours and twosomes. Solid protocol, on turf you can’t control: always somebody to watch your back.

Means it takes Steve a good twenty minutes of manoeuvring to get one guy on his own, in position—just the right spot, no cameras, a cross-alley to weave down. Takes a couple seemings, a weird noise here, a flicker of movement there, a strategic hex to snap one guy’s belt rig—equipment failure, _shit, just gotta go change this thing out_ —

And then Horowitz, of STRIKE Charlie, is left standing solo like some mook, stood-up for his date out the front of a movie theatre, in a nasty fuckin’ alley, in the low rent part of Philadelphia. Rifle cradled loose across the front of his body, rocking on his heels and smacking at the wad of gum in his jaw—

Steve breathes out, pulls the seeming spell through from his belly, his brainstem, spilling out of his hands like velvet rope tugged through the hollow of his bones and—and steps into the middle of the alley, scuffs his boot to make noise and Horowitz is turning, rifle coming up—

Stops, half-lurching against his own momentum, rifle going down again—

“Fuck,” Horowitz hisses, and then, louder: “ _Carter_.”

Steve’s illusion—soft fall of honey-gold hair and neat government pantsuit, practical shoes, her FNP-45 holstered in a tac rig under her left arm—Steve’s best Sharon Carter impression.

He stands loose and easy in the middle of the alley, like she’s got no place to be in a hurry, cocks her head and gazes cool as a cucumber square at Horowitz and—and hope to _Christ_ this dipshit knows enough to start leaking intel right about now—

“I’ve got Carter,” Horowitz is saying, hand to the comms bug in his ear. “She’s here, she’s right in front of me.”

Steve waits—no movement, no surges of song nearby—holds his ground in the middle of the alley, open stance, and Horowitz is blinking, listening, receiving instructions, how to proceed—

Nods, lifts his hand away from his comms.

Says: “Your compliance will be rewarded.”

He’s—he’s said it loud. Clear, crisp, like he’s gotta get every syllable across. Like it means—something. Maybe—could it be a passphrase? Some kinda code?

Silence—and Horowitz is staring, like he’s expecting something to happen, and then he cocks his head back and tries again, louder. “Your _compliance_ will be _rewarded_.”

Steve tilts his head to the side, lets the silence drag out like taffy, and then he turns on his heel and walks back around the corner—hears Horowitz’s yelped, “Hey, what the _shit_ ,” and the crunch of boots on concrete and—and the second he’s outta sight Steve drops the seeming and veils again, invisible, hidden, and then—

“What the _actual_ shit,” Horowitz laments, rounding the corner and finding a whole lotta nobody there, and Steve bites out a feral dog grin and tucks himself against the side of a dumpster, metal winter-chilled through the leather of Natasha’s jacket, and settles in to wait.

Rumlow turns up two minutes later, finds Horowitz searching the alley and swearing, a low steady churn of expletives like the rhythmic thrum of a steam engine.

“How the Hell did you lose her?” Rumlow asks, hard-edged and up in Horowitz’s personal bubble like they’re gonna start throwing punches, and Steve bares his teeth and watches ‘em—what’s the saying again? _Confusion to our enemies_ —watches the argument, pointing and snarling and—

“It wasn’t Carter, dipshit,” Rumlow snaps. “Can’t have been her.”

“It was her,” Horowitz answers. “Nothing wrong with my eyes, man.”

“You said the trigger words, like I told you?”

Trigger words—wait, what—

“I said ‘em,” Horowitz growls.

“And she just wandered off? Wasn’t Carter,” Rumlow says. “No way it was her. You said the words, she’da turned all compliant zombie mode. She’d still be standing where you stuck her, like a blow-up doll. So it wasn’t Carter. Dumbass.”

_Compliant zombie_ —Steve’s mouth floods with spit.

He’s gotta swallow, hard, choke back the urge to puke. Jesus Christ.

Jesus _Christ_.

They’re talking about brainwashing.

They’re talking about— _trigger words_. Compliance. Like with Bucky. Like what they’ve done to Buck. Holy Mother of Christ, they’ve fucked with the inside of her head.

_How_? How in God’s name did—whatever Department X did to Bucky. To Natasha, the memory tampering stuff—it took—isolation. Repetition, lots of it, and Sharon Carter is a Goddamn active SHIELD agent, and she’s lived one floor below Steve for most of the last two years, for pity’s sakes. When the Hell did Hydra have time and opportunity to—

“Go crack some doors in seventy-two,” Rumlow orders, and as he’s turning away he drops a hand to rest on—on the weapon holstered at his thigh, on the—

It’s a handgun but it’s a weird model. Nothing Steve’s seen before. Boxy, grey-black. Hint of gold chasing on the side, like—

Like speed stripes on a kid’s piece of shit racer. Like the Hammer _compliance tech_ weapons somebody went to a whole lotta trouble to try and steal outta the Detroit factory.

“Holy fuck,” Steve says, loud and flat, and thank Christ for the veil—

That’s a Hammer weapon. New, experimental. _Compliance tech_.

Holy _fuck_.


	15. Chapter 15

It’s a good couple hours before STRIKE start winding down their operation—

—and they’ve turned over a couple hundred homes, apartments, a fuck-tonne of businesses. A dozen homeless folks bedded down in the alleys, in the back of shops. Telling everybody they’re hunting for fugitives, dangerous, armed, probably Hydra agents.

Which is—fucked. And a sick kind of hilarious.

As long as Hydra have control of the narrative, SHIELD can arrest whoever the Hell they want. Lock up whoever the Hell they want, hunt ‘em through the streets, extrajudicially execute ‘em for _resisting arrest_. It’s martial law, and SHIELD is supposed to be clean, clean hands, the only guys left you can trust.

Christ, what a fuckin’ nightmare.

Steve’s spotted three fellas kitted out with the same kinda HammerTech gun that Rumlow is carrying. Team leaders, all of ‘em, senior operatives. Steve recognises every one of them, has worked SHIELD ops with every one of them. Harkins, Grey, Morrow.

And Rumlow.

How did this—how in _God’s name_ did this happen? This ain’t just some conspiracy, a few guys in the know, this is—fuckin’ hundreds of people. SHIELD agents. How the Christ did it get this far, did the rot get this deep—

Alexander Pierce. Sitting at the top of the pile, using his influence to put Hydra personnel in the right places, to ensure enough dark wet places for decay to grow. And now Hydra have complete control of SHIELD, all of SHIELD’s reach and resources, agents and installations all over the world and—

Jesus Christ—Steve cracks his knuckles, blinks a couple times, leans forward to rest his head against the steel of the fire escape cage—second floor, apartment building across the road from Clint’s safe house, where he’s been hovering like a fuckin’ gargoyle for the last twenty minutes, watching. Waiting.

Okay—okay. Head in the game, shithead. One mess at a time.

And then STRIKE start winding down their operation, packing down weapons and tearing down hazard tape and loading materiel back into their trucks—they got one team staying back, supervising the crime scene techs that are currently ripping Clint’s apartment to pieces, but everybody else is gearing up to go. Milling around, racking their rifles and talking shit about the Godawful cheapskate-brand protein bars that SHIELD supplies as field rations and—

Steve watches. Studies the movement of men in and out of trucks, wolf-brain checking over the herd for weakness, for prey, the slow and the sick and the lame and—

And those guns, holstered mid-thigh—Rumlow, Harkins, Grey, Morrow. Gold-chased, boxy. HammerTech. Four of ‘em.

Steve only needs one.

And then the milling is done and they’re piling in, eight to a van, and Steve swings down from the fire escape, slow and easy, prowls across the road and joins the end of a line just as the last couple of guys are filing into the truck and—

He’s pulled this party trick before. Times Square HQ, breaking Loki outta SHIELD’s sorcerer-proof underground pokey. Takes some fuckin’ doing, holding the two spells woven together when all they wanna do is fly apart, but it works like a Goddamn charm—and he’s lifting his hands, pulling both spells through and shoving them together inside his head and _pushing_ , pushing at the fabric of the world until it gives way and—

And he’s climbing into the back of the truck, nodding to the mook holding the door real casual-like—seeming of woven black Kevlar, STRIKE armour and helmet, boots and weapons rig and unremarkable white dude features showing under the faceplate of the helmet and—

And just enough of a _don’t-notice-me_ veil glossed over the whole thing that nobody’s gonna look too close. Or maybe ask why there’s nine fellas in the back of the truck when there oughta be eight.

Steve parks his ass on the bench seat running up the right hand side of the van, last guy in the pew, just enough distance that the douchebag to his right ain’t gonna pop his illusion with a stray elbow. Slouches back against the truck wall and looks around—STRIKE guys, rifle rack, benches, the ridges of the armour plates running down the walls.

Morrow, seated up the far end, HammerTech gun strapped to his thigh.

Angles, distances, targets.

Nobody looks back. Nobody looks twice.

Steve breathes out.

And wait—another couple minutes before the truck engine kicks over, vibration of the motor shuddering through the panels, and Steve lifts his head away and—and then it’s another Goddamn minute to wait before they’re moving out, purr of tyres grabbing bitumen.

The truck is rolling slow and steady, on the way home. No batshit urgency—stopped, traffic light. Rumble of the huge engine, patter of voices, STRIKE guys spinning shit.

If they’re going maybe 40 miles an hour—allow for traffic, allow for stop lights, allow for taking turns, changing direction. Gotta clear Rumlow’s three klick digital surveillance radius—five minutes. Say five minutes.

Steve breathes in, breathes out. Starts counting out the seconds— _Mississippi one. Mississippi two. Mississippi three_ —

One minute and— _Mississippi one_ —Steve rolls his neck, rolls his wrists, runs through the gestures of conjuring with his right hand, and then his left. Keeps breathing. Keeps counting. _Mississippi forty_ —

Two minutes.

Presses fingertips to the piercing at the top of his sternum and feels into the spell anchored there—his quick-deploy Cap shape—for the flavour and texture of the spell, how many layers of lacquer there are left. Still good for at least a couple more shifts— _Mississippi twenty-two_ —next piercing. Feels his way down, slow, checking each anchor, breathing. Counting.

Three minutes.

Steve cracks his knuckles. Breathes out. Drops his head and— _Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum_ —

“So, that Carter woman—she’s gotta do anything we say, right? Say the words and— _anything_ I want, right?”

It’s—Olsen, is his name, Steve thinks. Sitting on the other side of the truck, and his _greasy_ tone—and whatever fuckin’ gestures he’s makin’, whatever look he’s got on his stupid fuckin’ face, the other squids are laughing. Low and rough.

Like they think rape jokes are the funniest Goddamn thing.

Steve decides Olsen is gonna die first.

_Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus—_

_Mississippi sixty._

Four minutes.

Steve opens his eyes, sits up, looks around—STRIKE assholes, weapons, layout of the interior, heights and angles and the exact whereabouts of Olsen’s idiot face.

Closes his eyes again and goes _deep_.

Goes to the back of his head, to the part of his brain that’s holding all the pieces steady—his own seeming, and the _don’t-notice-me_ spell woven through it, and the seeming over their stolen truck, hiding Buck and Sam and Clint and Natasha and—and Carter, Jesus wept.

Grabs a hold of his _don’t-notice-me_ veil and breathes deep and hauls up power, from the base of his spine and his belly and—and feeds it into the veil, throwing fuel onto the fire, dialling up the volume—more, more—

Until he’s unremarkable as beige wallpaper. As flavourless as tap water. So not a soul’s gonna look too closely when he does this—

Steve rocks forward in his seat, tugs at his laces until he can toe his boots off and shove ‘em back under the bench seat. Takes another deep breath and reaches for the fires of unmaking, for that entropic force that rends atom from atom and—and he hauls the power up through his body, hissing aloud with the—Christ, that hurts. Like a bone-deep ache, bruising in the tissue of his core, right up his spine and into the back of his head and—shapes the hex, a few quick brutal twists of his hands, and then—and then hold, wait, and—

And the other hand. He reaches for more power—Holy Mary, Mother _fucker_ that stings—and pulls the spell together—simple veil, like he’s been doin’ since before he started shaving, since before he graduated outta short pants. Twist and fold and shove and he’s humming, low and thin as piano wire, left hand shaking with coiled pressure and—

Done. Steve stands up, taps his right hand to the wall of the van behind him—like he’s dabbing paint, smearing spell into metal with his fingertips—and then he steps forward, into the middle of the van, stepping light between sprawled boots and splayed legs. Taps the wall again—there, and over there, above this dumb fuck’s head, and on the rear doors—one, two—makes his way around the back of the van, leaving a smudged-on trail of veil until—

He feels the spell ripple and then pop as the circle closes—like the crack of an umbrella opening.

_Mississippi one._

Veiled, all of ‘em. The whole back of the van. No one is gonna hear what happens next.

Steve steps into the middle of the cramped space, the gap between knees and boots and batons, his stance wide, weight low, braced against the slow washing machine churn of the truck moving, accelerating and slowing and changing gears.

They’re starting to notice him now, a couple of the STRIKE goons, staring and blinking like they’re trying to make sense of what they’re seeing. A _don’t-notice-me_ veil only takes you so far when you’re doing somethin’ real noteworthy, like prancing around more-or-less in their fuckin’ laps.

Steve flashes the closest guy a wink, and then he opens his left hand and releases the hex.

_Mississippi two._

There’s a series of _crunching_ noises, the pop of sparks, clatter of metal and polymer hitting the floor in chunks.

The stun batons—he’s targeted their stun batons.

Close range weaponry—no one with any kinda tactical training is gonna use a fucking assault rifle inside of a twelve-foot by six-foot bulletproof box. Not a handgun, not any kinda projectile weapon, not with this many guys crammed into the space. You’d kill your own men.

Means they gotta fall back on batons, knives, fists. Means—

Voices, crying out or cursing. Movement, jolting in their seats, hands flying to belts, to smouldering batons. They’re all looking down, flapping at smoke, swearing blue and solid, dumb animal surprise.

Disarmed.

_Mississippi three._

Steve taps his topmost dermal piercing and shifts shape.

It’s fast, ugly, tear of muscle and skin and the howling ache of bone stretching out like taffy—his keening scream of pain distorting and breaking as the _don’t-see-me_ veil and the seeming rip to pieces like fuckin’ confetti and—

And he’s still screaming when he dumps his weight onto his left foot, coils the right leg up tight as razor wire, and snap-kicks Olsen square in the fuckin’ nose.

It’s—explosive movement, squids lurching to their feet and—and Olsen slams back against the armour plating, nose cartilage ploughed into the soft tissue of his brain—and Steve brings up his right elbow, jams it into—chest wall, wet crunch of ribs shattering and—

He’s turning, finding targets—clamour of voices, shouting, commands and cuss words and a Godawful garbled shriek—Steve kicks and the next guy’s knee is bent the wrong way and he goes down like a sack of shit and—

Punch to the back of the head and Steve’s ears ring, ring like the sticky-hot howl of burst eardrums, and he’s pivoting again—keep moving, dumbass, don’t give ‘em a clear target—striking at a neck with the blade edge of his hand—snatch up this cocksucker by the front of his Kevlar vest and throw him, hard, length of the van, clean up that asshole up the far end, unholstering his sidearm—

Stupid son of—

Bright white railroad spike of pain in—left shoulder, in his left shoulder blade. Wail of muscle shearing and the grind of metal on bone—knife, stab wound. Fuckin’ _excellent_ —heaves his weight forward and then turns his head and donkey-kicks back, left foot square into this mook’s belly, _hard_ , hard enough to tear organ tissue and muscle and blood vessels and—

Seven down—eight is—

Eight is back-pedaling hard, getting some distance—good strategy, _except for how you’re stuck in this metal box with me, sweetheart, you ain’t going nowhere_ and Steve closes fast—

—peripheral, snatch of movement at the edge of Steve’s gaze—guy with the fucked knee is hauling a k-bar knife outta his belt holster with a shaking hand, and Steve kicks it outta his hand on the way past, steps on some other asshole’s armoured midsection and closes in on the last guy who—

—Glock coming up to level at Steve’s fuckin’ face and he drops, ducks, weight low, and the _crack_ of gunfire comes a fuckin’ nanosecond later, deafening in this cosy Goddamn box, hornet-heat of the bullet passing half an inch over his head and—

—and then Steve’s on him, ploughs open-palm first into the guy’s face and follows it up with a knee, clean uppercut to the jaw coming through as the squid fuck folds forward to meet it and—

Down. Done.

And he’s turning, looking around, crazed adrenaline surge, bright sparks of pain lancing down his back, down his left arm—lookin’ for any movement, any threats—count out five heartbeats still pounding away, five sets of ragged breathing, and one of those is him.

Four squids still with the living.

Morrow isn’t one of ‘em.

He’s—musta been the fella Steve hit in the neck—half-buried under another squid, head shifting limp on his spine with the distant grinding sound of bone moving against bone as Steve shoves him over, hauls the HammerTech gun outta his thigh holster. Shoves the gun into the back of his pants—fuckin’ amateur hour, but he doesn’t have a holster spare, needs both hands free for conjuring. Or brawling.

Four squids still breathing. One of ‘em is swearing, thin and breathless, clutching at ribs, and another fella is heaving away like he’s gonna bring up somethin’ vital, and one is—

—digging a Glock out from under and bringing it up and around and—

—and Steve steps across and stamps down, bare foot driving his gun hand to the floor and pinning it, grinding down with the ball of his foot and—

And Steve makes the mistake of looking the squid in the face as he howls with pain, muted crackle of small bones breaking where they’re sandwiched between the grip of the Glock, Steve’s weight, the metal floor.

Looks him in the face and—it’s Jackson. It’s Danny fuckin’ Jackson, STRIKE Charlie. Steve has run missions with this guy. With all of these guys. And now—

Steve lets up, scoops up the Glock outta the ground hamburger ruin of Jackson’s hand. Swallows, once, hard, because _Jesus Christ_ and also fucking Hydra _, fuck this whole Godawful mess_ —

“I accept your surrender,” Steve says, loud and flat, aware of the tacky pull of blood gluing his shirt to his back, of the lurch of his heartbeat slowing up, adrenaline draining from his bloodstream and leaving him hollowed out, sick with it—

“Go _fuck_ your surrender,” slurs the dumb fucker with the back-to-front Goddamn knee joint, and Steve shoots him in the head, blunt slap of gunfire and the wet crack of the skull shattering and—

Silence. Wheeze of harsh breath.

Three squids still with the living.

“Anybody else?” Steve asks, and when nobody’s got an answer for that he releases the magazine from the gun, tosses the bullets and drops the pistol where he’s standing, pads on blood-sticky bare feet to the back of the truck. Scoops up his boots and taps his walking veil anchor, goes dark. Levers open the rear door and jumps out into the road.

*******

He misses the rendezvous at the rally point by half an hour.

It’s a gas station slash chain restaurant conglomerate mass, over the river and into Jersey, the kinda place where the lights never go out and the coffee is always burnt black, and they’re gone when he gets there.

Which is good—for op sec. They need to keep moving, if they wanna be safe.

It’s just a pain in the Goddamn ass for Steve.

He’d stripped and dumped his burner phone in a gutter back in town, and the others will have done the same by now—too great a risk that they’re compromised, with Sharon Carter operating as Hydra’s puppet spy.

He stands on the tarmac in the reek of diesel fumes—the truck he’d hitched a lift with, fuelling up. Sun is low on the horizon in the west. He’s done a couple laps of the place to be sure, checked all the cars, all the faces—but they’re gone, moved on, and he’s swinging in the wind.

“Okay,” Steve says, cracks his knuckles, closes his eyes and pushes his fists to his sternum and just breathes, basic-ass centring exercise his Da taught him most of a century ago, because breathing isn’t optional and he needs to not fuckin’ fall apart at the seams right now.

Think, you dumb son of a bitch, just—just fuckin’ think.

Gotta find the others. Gotta get to ‘em before—before someone gets the bright idea of running at Hydra to rescue Steve, or—or before Buck totally fuckin’ unhinges from Goddamn reality.

Gotta figure out what in God’s name Hydra have done to Carter.

Gotta figure out how the HammerTech guns fit into this absolute Goddamn Jackson Pollock clusterfuck. Gotta—

Tug of—of attention, of awareness, pressure, in the back of his head. In that behind-the-backdrop kinda place where he shoves the low-maintenance spells he’s got purring quietly, take fuck-all concentration to keep up and running—his basic veils and simple illusions, over himself and—

And over the truck the others were driving. Hooked into the hats Sam and Carter were wearing, and—and there are trace threads of veil hanging offa Bucky’s jacket, the tattered remnants of the seeming spell he’d cast over Clint’s face before they set foot outside the coffee shop this morning—

Threads. Strands of Steve’s concentrated will. Pulsing, shifting, in rhythm with the sluggish beating of his heart. Tugging at him—

South-east. From the south-east.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph—okay. Okay, he can work with this.

Steve shakes his hands out, breathes out, sends up a signal flare of _thank you_ to—to the sky, to God maybe, to whoever is still taking Steve’s calls—and then he shoves his hands into his pockets and slopes his way around the carpark again until he gets to the monitoring black spot he’d found on his first couple passes around, no cameras, and—

And when he walks back out of the black spot he’s got a new seeming on, a new face, something a little prettier to ante-up his chances, and then he hits the highway heading south, his thumb out to the road.

*******

Atlantic City and—

It’s true night now, lights up, red and gold and white of marquees and spotlights against the ink black of the sky, cold and clear, cold enough that the gamblers and tourists out in the streets are wearing coats and boots. The air smells like car exhaust and the ersatz-vanilla stink of smoke machines—that drag show, half a block back—and very faintly like the sea, salt-slick.

Steve is navigating half-blind, lurching along with the tug of the sorcery in his head—urgently, urgently, before time and distance wears it all away, booted feet pounding sidewalk in lockstep with his heartbeat. Stops for a half second on a street corner to clench his fists and turn his attention inwards—forward, still forward, and then—

He enters the hotel through the back door, service entry propped open with a brick and one of the line cooks hovering in the back alley, half-frozen and powering through a cigarette like it’s water and light and mother’s milk all rolled into one paper. Prowls veiled through the store rooms and past the kitchen—shouting and ring of metal on metal from inside, garlic and seafood stink like a slap to the face, and Steve’s gut rolls over between nausea and yawning emptiness.

Forward and up—service stairs, climbing, up and up, smoulder burning in his thighs because he’s walked for fuckin’ miles. Found a couple rides early on that got him most of the way here, but then the sun got lower and no one was risking it anymore, and this would be so much Goddamn easier if he could switch over to his Cap shape and leap small buildings in a single bound but he needs his sorcery, needs to be able to feel—

Here, here, this floor—level eight, numbers and codes painted on the beige of the concrete wall—and Steve half-shoves at the door, goes to—stop. Wait, deadshit, just—

Stops. Takes a breath and lets it out, slow—he’s pared himself down to wolf-brain, the urgency of the hunt tugging at him like a meathook snagged between the ribs, and he’s gotta—get the human brain back online.

Looks around—no cameras here, no monitoring. Drops his veil, shuddering it off, and then he drops his head to rest against the wood and steel of the fire door and conjures up a seeming, quick and messy—white and black press of cloth, goatee and slicked back hair, the cook from the alley.

Okay—shoves the door open and steps through, out onto the eighth floor. Stops again, orienting—dark crimson of the wallpaper and distant clinging scent of old cigarettes and—there, to the left. The pull, his sorcery—

Striding forward and down—past hotel room doors, some ugly fuckin’ framed art print of boats and—last door on the right, he can _feel_ it like someone is pulling copper wire out and through the dead centre of his forehead, and then—muted whisper of snowfall and the bell-high tremble of piano chords from—

—from _behind him_ , and Steve stops dead, half-turns—

—into the barrel of a gun, digging into his temple as he turns.

“Tell me who sent you,” Natasha is purring, low and smokey and deadly as a switchblade knife, “and I might—”

And then she stops. Steve can hear the minute stutter in her breath as his seeming falls apart from the temple down, from where her gun is piercing the illusion—coils of gold and silver light sloughing away and dissolving, and—

Dead silence, punctuated by ragged breathing. Steve holds, doesn’t move, hands open and empty at his sides. He can see her sleeve, a hint of red hair out of the very edge of his gaze. The gun at his head doesn’t move.

“It’s me,” Steve says, after a minute. “Natashenka. It’s your Comrade Stepushka.”

He can hear her shift, ever so slight, the creak of leather boots. And then—“How did you find us?”

“Sorcery,” Steve blurts. “I—my magic. There are still bits of it stuck to everybody. I followed the, uh—the smell of it.”

The gun at his temple digs in another hair’s breadth deeper. “Tell me something only he would know.”

“The—uh,” Steve starts, stops, says in a rush: “The serum gave me Disney princess powers. It’s how I can talk to animals.”

Another couple heartbeats of silence, of her processing what the Hell—and then he hears her breath catch and then gun at his temple twitches, remembering—his apartment, coming in through a window to find him watching _Snow White_ and—

“Oh—” Natasha says, rough at the edge like it’s been punched outta her, and then the gun jerks down and away and she’s grabbing at him, hauling his face around like she’s gotta inspect him, green eyes darting and—

“ _Zhopa_ ,” she says, and her fingers dig into his jaw and shake like he’s a misbehaving pup. Her expression is fixed, neutral and distant as the stars, but the corner of her mouth is twitching and her eyes are wild and bright as sparks from a welding torch. Her gun hand shakes as she holsters the Glock at her hip.

“Hey Nat,” Steve says, crooks his mouth into something like a half-smile past the bite of her fingertips, and then she’s letting go and shoving him in the shoulder, taking a half-step back, re-establishing distance.

“Still not dead, then,” she says, bland as unbuttered toast.

“Can’t seem to stick the landing,” Steve says, and then: “Everyone okay?” _Is Bucky okay—please Christ God Almighty Mam and all the Saints let him be okay_ —

Natasha cocks an eyebrow. “For a given value of okay, sure.” And then her face levels out again, careful, cool as marble, and her voice comes flat as a straight razor as she says: “Tell me what you know about Sharon Carter.”

*******

Sharon Carter is cuffed to the underside of the sink in their hotel suite’s second bathroom, and she’s mad as Hell about it.

“I’m not the mole,” she snaps, jerking at her handcuffs for punctuation. “I’m not _Hydra_. Jesus, those Goddamn fascists have fed you some kinda counter-intel bull and you’ve swallowed it—I would _never_ betray SHIELD.”

“You sure about this, man?” Clint asks, quirking an eyebrow.

The bathroom is all beige tile and a mirror the size of the Goddamn wall, and it’s cosy with the four of ‘em crammed in there—Sharon, Steve, Clint, and Natasha. They’d searched Carter, taken her toys—gun, phone, garrotting wire, the pair of smaller guns she was carrying concealed at the small of her back. Cuffed her, kept her under guard. And—

“Her story hasn’t changed. No reason to believe she’s lying,” Clint continues, crossing his arms and leaning back against the tile.

He’s right, is the thing: Sharon Carter reads like total honesty, offended and righteous and real. There’s no trace of falsehood in her face, the lines of her body, in the tone and pitch and pace of her voice. Which means—

Means she’s got no Goddamn idea.

Jesus Christ Almighty.

“I’m sure,” Steve says to Clint. Takes a deep breath and turns to Natasha and—and she’s watching Carter, close as a hunting hound, surgical as a blade, waiting. Ready.

Steve turns to Sharon. Looks her in the eye—she’s pissed off, fear running through the depths like a deep sea current. Hair coming loose from the braid at her back. Her eyes are pale and bright and clear.

She has no idea what Hydra have done to her, and now he’s gotta—

“I’m so Goddamn sorry about this, Sharon,” Steve tells her. Takes a deep breath. Looks her in the eye and says: “Your compliance will be rewarded.”

The change is—immediate. Her expression, her body language—everything shifts, levels out, smooth and mellow as melted butter. And then she smiles, bright and false as a car salesman on the last day of the month.

“I’m happy to comply,” Sharon says, warm and golden.

There’s a heartbeat of dead silence, and then—

“Mother _fucker_ ,” Clint snarls, low and raw like he’s nursing a stab wound in the gut, and he’s pivoting on his heel and walking out, quick march.

Jesus wept.

It’s honest-to-Christ mind control. Actual Goddamn brainwashing, done quick and clean enough that no one—not her friends, not her colleagues, not nobody noticed. Buried deep enough that not even Sharon fuckin’ knew it was there.

Christ on a bike, this is—this is violation. This is rape on the level of the fucking soul.

Steve’s gotta close his eyes and just breathe for a second, drawing breath slow past the roil of nausea in his gut. Holy Mary, Mother of God, every Goddamn time he think’s he’s hit the bottom of this barrel of fuckin’ laughs—

“Sharon,” Natasha says—dropping into a crouch next to Carter, speaking low, soothing. Like she’s talking to a sleepwalker. “When you left the Philadelphia safe house yesterday, what happened next?”

And Sharon lays it out—staring into the mid-distance, her voice—friendly. Bright. Like she’s cold-calling to sell you some shit you never knew you needed.

How she’d hit up a couple different convenience stores for burner phones, gone to Walmart for a few bags of cheap-shit clothes and underwear, basic toiletries—enough to tide ‘em all over another couple of days. How she’d found an all-night coffee shop with decent wifi and sat in there nursing cappuccinos, one after another, and using their wifi to backdoor-access SHIELD’s main server.

Looking for intel, looking for any Goddamn clue where Fury and Hill might be. Dead-dropping messages into a few email inboxes, agents she trusts, whose personal loyalty is above question—not loyalty to Pierce, not even to SHIELD as an institution, but to Fury and to Peggy before him and to the ideals SHIELD was built upon. And then—

And then one last message into Agent Brock Rumlow’s inbox.

As per her orders.

“You’re doing well, Sharon,” Natasha says—she’s settled in on the floor by now, sat with one leg cocked across the other like they’re gal pals catching up, like there oughta be a vodka martini in one of her hands. “This is valuable intel, and you were right to bring it forward,” and Steve’s gotta get out of here, he’s gotta—

Gotta not be here. Get out and let Natasha do her thing: spin lies and truth together around the fractured Goddamn mess of Sharon Carter’s fucking psyche, until she can pull something usable out of there. And Steve’s not gonna be any help to her if he vomits on the fucking tiles.

He shifts his weight forward, just enough to catch Natasha’s eye for a half a second. Gives her a nod and then turns on a dime and marches his ass back outta there.

Back out into the main room of the suite, cream and crimson on the walls broken by the gaping black eye of the television, furniture clumped in groups like gossiping nuns and—

And Sam is up and off the—what did they call ‘em? Fainting couch, like the guys who furnished this suite imagined a lotta repressed Victorian hijinks happening in here—up and off the couch like a greyhound after the rabbit. “Steve. You okay, man?”

“I’m okay,” Steve lies, instinctive and immediate as breathing, claws through the rat trap mess of the inside of his head to try and make his face match the words, try and—Goddamn. “Sam, are you good? Your family okay?”

“Yeah, I—I spoke to my Mama,” Sam says, crossing the room to haul up in front of Steve, stand with his hands on his hips. “She’s going to ground, got some old family friends who can hide her. My sister is backpacking in—Peru, last we heard. And if we can’t find her, Hydra’s not gonna know where to start. Left a message on her friend’s phone. I’ve done—” He stops, blinks, swallows hard and looks away.

“I’ve done what I can. All I can, without putting ‘em in more danger, getting too close. Gotta hope it’s enough.”

“Sam—I’m sorry, man, I didn’t mean to drag you into this shit show—”

“You didn’t drag me anywhere,” Sam cuts him off, swift and level. “I dragged you. You remember that? Me showing up at your door with Steph’s sister, dumping this whole mess in your lap?”  
  
Christ on a crutch, they’re as bad as each other. _Come down from the crucifix, gentlemen_ , Peggy would be sayin’ right about now.

He’s not gonna get a medal for winning this argument, so—

“Where’s Buck?” Steve asks—can hear Bucky’s song, that Godawful shriek of metal saw teeth cutting away bone, but it’s muffled, distant. He’s here somewhere but he ain’t shown his face, which is—unexpected, given he’s been stuck to Steve’s ass like a burr every chance he’d got for the last couple days—

“Your boy has started worshipping the porcelain god,” Sam answers, and when Steve just stares, just—what in God’s name—Sam quirks his mouth and turns, beckons with a nod of his head, leads the way—

Into the suite’s main bathroom. Where Bucky is sat on the floor next to the toilet, back against the wall, ghost pale and shaking and reeking of vomit.

“Jesus,” Steve breathes, and—strangles his first idiot impulse to get up in Bucky’s face, put hands on him, because Steve’s a dumb motherfucker but even he knows better’n to unexpectedly grab at the traumatised super soldier. “Buck. You look like Hell.”

“You say the sweetest things,” Bucky slurs, smearing at his face with his human hand, and his accent is so Goddamn Brooklyn right now he coulda stepped here right offa Bedford Ave circa 1938, and then he twitches, shudders, drops his hand back to his side in a clamp-tight fist. “Sir.”

“Is this…” Steve gets closer, drops to a crouch. Remembers the cell, Bucky heaving over the toilet—“Is he withdrawing offa something? I thought we—he was throwing up a couple days ago, but it passed.”

Sam cocks his head, leans against the door frame. “Hydra were using drugs to keep him copacetic? Might be a second round of detox. Could be they’d given him a depot or something, long-term controlled release, and this one’s only just wearing off now.”

Steve nods, turns back to look at Bucky—stops. Wait, fuck—“Or Hydra operatives dosed him up again while he was prisoner with SHIELD, and that’s why the vomiting stopped first time around.”

Sam closes his eyes, a pained look crossing his face. “Shit. Yeah, or that.”

Jesus, Mary and Joseph—“Buck?” Steve asks, turning back to face him again. Bucky’s slumping gently sideways, resting his head against the tank, hanks of dark hair glued to the sweat on his forehead, his cheekbone—“Buck,” Steve says again, and Bucky cracks his eyes open, unfocused like somebody’s kicked him real hard in the head.

“Sir,” he croaks again.

“Did you get dosed with something while you were in that cell at the SHIELD site?” Steve asks.

Bucky closes his eyes again. “Maintenance IV,” he says. “Needed it, stay functional.”

Jesus fucking wept. And Steve served him up on a silver platter to these assholes. Turned him over to SHIELD and took his hands off the wheel, and fucking Hydra were right there, stepped straight back into their usual regime of drugs and torture without missing a Goddamn beat.

“Oh, Goddamn it,” Sam mutters, low and tired.

Amen to that.

“Bucky?” Steve asks, and when that doesn’t get any response—“Soldier. Sweetheart.”

He hauls his eyes open again. Focuses up on Steve’s face like each eyeball is a lead weight he’s gotta heave into place by hand.

Steve says, “You got any idea what we can expect here? I can’t get you any more of that stuff, don’t even know what drugs they had you on. I got the feeling this is gonna get worse before it gets better.”

“Need it,” Bucky mumbles. “M’no use to nobody if I can’t even fuckin’ walk.”

And if he can’t walk, he sure as Hell wasn’t running anywhere.

When Hydra had him, if he’d ever got his mind clear enough for a half second, enough to put his head down and try’n run. How far would he get before their drugs wore off, and withdrawal sent him to his knees? It’s a chemical leash—invisible, intangible, claw-deep into his nervous system—

“Ahh, Christ,” Buck gasps, sitting up like someone’s stuck him with a sewing needle, and—

“What?” Steve asks.

“Need—toilet, now. Jesus, now,” Bucky answers.

“ _And_ I’m out,” Sam declares from the doorway, back turned and powering outta there like the Goddamn coward he is.

“Jesus weeping Christ,” Steve cusses, and ducks in to grab Bucky by the jacket, by the shoulder, start hauling him up off the ground.

*******

After the worst of it is over Steve helps Buck into the shower stall, gets him squared up sitting at the bottom, half-collapsed against the tile of the wall, strips off the puke-stained jacket and jeans, flips the water on—

—and Bucky grunts when the water hits his skin, low and raw, head and shoulders twitching like he’s stifling a full-bodied flinch, and then—and then he shudders, sighing shaky, wet hand going to his face, smearing water around. Hiding.

“Okay, Buck?” Steve asks, checking the temperature—he’s kinda half in, half outta the shower, boots off and jacket off and stolen HammerTech gun stashed in the bathroom sink. Caught between giving Buck enough space for some Goddamn measure of dignity, of privacy, and needing to stay close, stay inside of grabbing range.

He’s so _bad_ at this, the whole care taking thing. Never had to look after Bucky before, not in fourteen years of friendship and—and whatever else they turned into, between ‘em, over the years. Never nursed him through anything worse’n a hangover.

His Mam, when she was getting sicker, before she got diagnosed and shipped off to die, she’d let him make her cups of tea, boil the kettle so she could take a hot bath but never—she’d never let herself lean on him. Gritted her teeth around a mouthful of coughed-up blood and did for herself. That pride, that stubbornness—it didn’t just come from his Da’s side of the family.

“M’swell,” Bucky mutters. Turns his face into the water, catches a mouthful, spits it out again—clearing his mouth. He’s—this is sarcasm. Sarcasm is new—or old. Bucky Barnes, before seventy years of torture and electroshock burned him down to reflexes and razor wire and obedience.

And then—“You left me,” Bucky mumbles, water sheeting down over his brow, head turned so he can look Steve in the face, close, studying—“Fucked off and ran your op, didn’t come back. Blood all down your back like someone fuckin’ killed you. And you left me behind. The Hell d’you get me outta cryo for if you ain’t gonna use me?”

Steve stares—he’s distantly aware that he’s mouth-open gaping like a dying fish, no control over what his face is doing. _Get me out of cryo_ —just—cryo is—

Cryofreeze. He’s talking about cryogenics, and Steve—

—remembers the _Valkyrie_ , the ice, being cut out from the plane when SHIELD finally found him and how the scientists had been talking about him, his body, being in an _unregulated cryogenic state_ , which—which is only language you’re gonna use if you’re already familiar with _regulated_ cryogenic states.

And shop-standard humans can’t survive cryogenesis. Can’t—cell walls don’t hold up to the stretching, the distortion, when the fluids inside ‘em freeze, crystallise. Steve made it out more-or-less intact because he’s half fuckin’ frost giant, the kinda genetic freak bullshit that literally no other son of a bitch is gonna be able to replicate, but—but then Bucky isn’t a shop-standard human.

He’s strong, fast. Got the kind of healing factor that’ll let him survive having a metal arm welded to his spine, keep him upright and walking and talking after decades of electroshock to the brain. So—

So, cryofreeze. So—

Remembers the upright tank in the Hydra base under Los Angeles. The chair, and the tank. Like throwing a chicken breast into the Goddamn freezer ‘cause you don’t wanna eat it yet, only it’s a person, it’s a _fucking human being_ and they _froze him_ when they weren’t _using him—_

_—_ and Steve _knows_ the pain of freezing alive, the pain of waking in half-frozen meat and bone, the howl of tissue and blood and bone and they—how many times? How many times, over the decades with Hydra, with the Red Room? How many Goddamn times did they make him feel—

—and Steve is doubled over, hiding his face against his knees because he can’t—he’s snarling, growling deep in his chest, nothing human about it, and if Rumlow or Pierce or some other Hydra fuck were to walk in here right now he’d go for them with his fucking teeth.

He’s gonna—he’s gonna fuckin’ find that tank, wherever the Hell it ended up—some SHIELD storage facility, probably, mothballed until Hydra have SHIELD locked down tight enough to pull it out again and start using it openly.

He’s gonna find that tank and stuff a dozen grenades in its belly, watch it go up like it’s the fourth of fuckin’ July, piss on the smouldering shrapnel.

Anybody who’s fuckin’ so much as _looked_ at Bucky Barnes in the last seven Goddamn decades—

And it’s dead silent, past the hiss of the shower water hitting tile, cloth, skin. Dead silent, like Bucky ain’t even breathing, and Steve bites down hard on the inside of his cheek and squeezes his hands into fists and forces his face to—to stop doin’ that, shithead. Get it together. Pulls his features into something human, neutral, locked down hard, and looks up from his knees.

Bucky is still as a corpse, pressed against the tiles at his back like he wants to seep into the grout and disappear for a while. He’s looking past Steve’s shoulder, watching like—like he’s a threat.

Jesus wept.

“It’s okay,” Steve lies, kicking his voice up a register or so. “We’re okay, Buck. Soldier. We’re okay.”

He forces his face into—into some kinda rictus attempt at a half-smile. Reaches out with a shaking hand and catches—it’s Bucky’s left wrist, lukewarm with stolen heat from the shower, the metal slick, sharp edges of the plates under his fingertips.

He—he must have some feeling with this hand, must—if he can fight with it, kill with it, then he’s gotta have some sensation, so—so Steve squeezes, firm. Looks Bucky in the eye and squeezes until the weird pasted-on smile shifts into something almost real.

Bucky stares, blinking away shower water, and then he reaches back, mirroring. Puts his human hand over Steve’s and squeezes, light, careful.

Okay. Okay. Steve turns his hand over, catches Bucky’s fingers with his own, and lets the eye contact break.

“This ain’t Hydra,” Steve says roughly, scrubbing with his fingertips at the ground-in grey of sweat and dirt over Bucky’s right hand. “Okay? This ain’t Hydra, and nobody is _using you_ for any Goddamn thing.”

“Yeah?” Bucky drawls, his gaze going to the glass of the shower screen, distant. “Not the first time one of my handlers has tried to sell me that line.”

Mother Mary, fulla _fuck's sake_. Steve is gonna have to take a page outta his Da’s book, find a witch, learn necromancy, and dig up the ghosts of seventy years worth of _fucking handlers_ so he can personally fucking murder them dead again.

“I am _not your handler_ ,” he snarls. “I’m your—I’m your Goddamn Steve.”

It’s the stupidest Goddamn thing he could possibly say but—but he doesn’t have language for what they were to each other, in the end. Best friends, but—but even before they’d started fucking, it was more than friendship. Something closer to blood, to—to kin. And then the fucking, and the Western Front, fighting and bleeding and killing to keep each other safe.

They’d lied for each other. They’d shared spit and blood and spunk and every Goddamn body fluid two humans could spill. They’da been man and wife, if not for the small fact of they were both men.

And Bucky is looking him in the face, looking him in the eye, focusing up. Blinks, a couple times. Swallows, his jaw working.

“I thought you were bigger,” he rasps.

Steve’s breath catches in his chest, pinched like his asthma is flaring. Feels like his heart muscle is molten metal, heat flaring under his sternum so bright and fierce it _hurts_. Bucky is watching him, studying, his steel-grey eyes alert and lucid and—

The bathroom door cracks open and—it’s Natasha, striding in, finding them with her gaze and then immediately focusing razor-sharp onto Steve, like the two grown-ass men sitting soaked and clothed in the bottom of a shower stall ain’t even the most noteworthy shit she’s seen today.

“The HammerTech gun,” she says. “The one you took from Hydra. Where is it?”

“Uh,” Steve says, blinking, calibrating—“In the sink.”

Natasha snakes over to the sink, snatches up the gun, one hand, holds it by the grip like she’s testing the weight of it, studying the shape of the barrel, the flash of gold down the sides, the slick little buttons dotted across the top—

Turns back to Steve, gun down at her side. Says, “We’re going to need Stark.”


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey loves. Hope your holiday season is going gently and joyfully, whether you are celebrating holy days or resting up or getting time with loved ones <3
> 
> Teeny content note for some body horror in this chapter. It's not long, but it's definitely above canon level in terms of the violence (when I first floated the idea to one of my betas, they were like 'no. no. don't do it ho nooo' which is clearly feedback I took on board really strongly). Skip to the end notes if you'd like to go in primed for the yikes :D

The HammerTech gun sits on the glossy white of the coffee table, grey and angular and ugly as sin, an unexploded shell sticking out of a field of unblemished snow. Clint is sitting, hunched, staring at it like it’s a fuckin’ rattlesnake and if he breaks eye contact it’s gonna strike.

“So,” Sam says, from where he’s standing behind the sofa, arms crossed. “Mind control ray guns. That’s a thing now.”

“Seems like,” Steve says, leaning deeper into the doorframe—he’s hovering, half here and half listening, his awareness open to the music, to the songs in the suite—Bucky in the bathroom down the hall, sacked out on a pile of towels in the corner, his music low, regular. Sharon Carter, still locked down in the other bathroom—her song is deep, hypnotic cello notes, sliding and welling, woven through with a hiss like rainfall on open water and—and it’s jagged, chaotic.

She’s—not okay.

Listening for Natasha’s song. She has ducked into the main bedroom with a burner phone and laptop, reaching out for—and she’s been in there for a good twenty minutes now. If—if Tony was gonna help, surely to Christ she should have an answer by now—

“How the Hell does it work?” Sam asks. “It’s not—human brains don’t _work_ like that.”

“Best guess is, they used Loki’s sceptre,” Steve says.

“Loki,” Sam says. “That’s the bad dude from the Battle of New York, right?”

_My Da_. Our Father, who art missing in action—probably back on Asgard by now, ruining Odin’s day—

“He had a sceptre—this spear,” Steve says, and he’s holding his voice steady, level, neutral, his eyes fixed on Clint. “Alien tech, or magic, or both. Let him turn people into his personal sock puppets, easy as flicking a switch.”

Clint doesn’t look up. Doesn’t flinch. Keeps his eyes fixed on the HammerTech weapon. He’s a couple shades paler than he oughta be, lower lip raw where he’s been chewing at it.

Clint Barton—he fronts a good game, but New York fucked him up. Loki’s sceptre, waking up to a world he’d almost helped to end—it fucked him up somethin’ _awful_. And now—

“SHIELD got the sceptre after the dust settled,” Steve continues. “And—on paper, anyway—they locked it down in the Fridge.”

“That’s—that’s your vault for super-powered bad guys and weird tech?”

“That’s the one. Only it turns out what’s in the Fridge is a fake,” Steve says. “And now Hydra have brainwashing tech, works as fast as flicking a switch.”

“No muss, no fuss.” Clint’s voice comes blurred against the meat of his hand, rubbing over his mouth. He drops his hand, nests his fingers together again, looks up from the weapon to meet Steve’s gaze.

“They swapped the sceptre out before it ever went in the vault,” Clint says. “Easier to do it in transit, moving, lots of people, lots of sets of hands. That’s how I woulda done it. Means they’ve had it for just under two years, now. Long enough to work out how to mass produce mind control.”

Movement—the bedroom door opens and Natasha leans out, fingers hooked into the doorframe. She glances around—reading the room, lightning fast, gaze lingering for a nano-second longer on Clint and then—and then landing on Steve.

“I’ve got his attention,” she says. “You’ve gotta bring it home.”

Jesus Christ. “Why me?”

Last time Steve saw Tony Stark was at the Ivy City black site. There was a half foot of titanium alloy mechanised armour between ‘em at the time. Not to mention the small fact of the whole SHIELD ambush, capture or kill. And now—

“He doesn’t trust me,” Natasha says.

“He doesn’t trust _me_ ,” Steve says—and he can’t blame Tony, really, given recent history, Steve’s track record as a half-alien shapeshifting compulsive-lying piece of shit—

“He used to,” Natasha says, quirking her eyebrows, and then there is a heartbeat of silence, staring at each other, a lull-beat in their songs, overlapping, and—

Steve knows full Goddamn well how lonely Tony is. How isolated. More’n usual, if he’s been sick after his operation.

Tony doesn’t trust easy, keeps people in a revolving doorway in and outta the foyer of his life but doesn’t let many inside. But—but he’d let Steve in. Kinda.

“Sell it, Rogers,” Natasha says, and then she swings back into the bedroom.

Steve closes his eyes for a second—just breathes, just—

They need Tony. And Tony—he’s one of the good guys. Once he understands, once he’s on board, he’ll be all in—Christ knows he’s not the kinda man to stand back with a thumb up his ass while Hydra establishes a new world order.

So—so it’s not like Steve’s using their friendship to manoeuvre Tony into buying a timeshare or a set of Goddamn steak knives.

So this feels—ugly, feels like—but it’s _not_ manipulation, not really.

It’s just the truth is so much Goddamn stranger than fiction. So they’ve gotta persuade him.

Steve rolls his shoulders, and cracks his knuckles, and conjures up a seeming—himself, Captain Rogers-shaped, clear-eyed and combed and together. Shrugs it on and lets it settle over his features, faintest prickling sense of weight on his eyelashes and his shoulders. And then he walks into the bedroom to spin out the story of a secret Nazi conspiracy with _mind control ray guns_ to Tony Stark.

*******

Tony Stark—boxed in on the screen of Natasha’s burner laptop—looks like hammered shit.

He’s pale as wallpaper paste, sunken bags under his eyes, shadowy smears of stubble coming in thick around the careful defined landscaping of his facial hair. Nasal cannulas pushing oxygen. Irregular bumpy shapes under the press of his T-shirt, all across his left collarbone—wound drains, maybe, or some kinda bandaging.

He shifts against—pillows behind him, white, creases neat. Back on the oxygen, back in a hospital bed—Christ, he must be sick as a dog. He was— _sick_ , when he came to Ivy City, to the SHIELD ambush, but he was upright. Walking.

He’d hauled himself out of his bed, out of isolation, because Fury asked it of him. Because they needed Iron Man if they were gonna have a hope of capturing the _rogue magic user_ that’d stolen Steve Rogers’ life. And now he was sicker than he’d been to start with.

God fuckin’ damn it. Consequences, consequences for Steve’s lies, spilling forward and earning interest over time.

And—and it’s been silent for a long minute, Tony staring. Studying. Quiet hiss of oxygen flow, steady beep from some kinda monitoring in the background.

“So. You’re—what, some kinda wizard, Harry?” Tony asks, breaks the silence.

Steve would sooner chew an arm off than give Tony the satisfaction of acknowledging that reference. “I’m a sorcerer,” he says. “Since forever, since the Twenties. And I’m still Steve Rogers.”

“That’s what I hear,” Tony says, musing, and Steve can hear a flurry of tapping, mindless, metallic, like he’s rapping his fingers on something. “You’ve got Romanov and Barton convinced. So Captain America is like your drag persona?”

“Shapeshifting is one of my party tricks,” Steve says. “Give myself another foot of height and about a hundred pounds of muscle. Captain America is Steve Rogers is me. None of it was a lie.”

“So you’re a magic user and a tank,” Tony says, the bland kinda tone he uses when he figures he’s talking way up over Steve’s head. “Seems kinda poor character design, pretty OP to me.”

Dungeons and _fucking_ —“Actually my primary class is rogue,” Steve says, equally bland and level. “Spent most of my skill points on sneaking and lock picking.”

Tony twitches, mouth curling up at one end, and then a hand comes up to clamp over his ribs.

“I refuse to laugh, it hurts too much. I’ll have you arrested, this is assault.”

And that’s Tony, Tony Stark, his endless flow of ideas and phrases tumbling over like they can’t get out of his mouth fast enough, manic and—and Steve has _missed this_.

Jesus Christ, he’s missed this—and it’s not like he could ever be all the way _real_ with Tony, not like they coulda been best chums, but they were friends, kinda, and then Ivy City happened and Tony put the suit on—

And it fuckin’ stung. It ached, low in Steve’s ribcage, knowing he’d fucked that friendship up. It’s a weird kinda friendship, all spikes and ego and stubbornness, Howard Stark’s ghost in the corner of the room and Steve’s secret agenda to keep Tony on side so when the next Goddamn invasion from outer space comes, they’re something like ready for it and—

And yet, he likes Tony. None of that was a lie either.

“So what do we know about the Hydra weapons tech?” Tony asks, and—and he’s said _we_. Us. Because he’s on board.

Thank God for that. Holy Mary, Mother of God, thank you.

They’ve maybe got a shot at this after all.

*******

When Steve emerges from the bedroom most of an hour later—

“— _planned to continue through this weekend_ ,” the reporter on the TV news is saying, brown hair in a sleek chignon and a poppy peach pink lip that Steve takes a mental snapshot of—so he can track the colour down and buy himself some later, assuming the world doesn’t end. Behind her is—grey, cement and slick stone facing and a sign—HammerTech.

That’s HammerTech’s Manhattan headquarters—Steve’s done his share of time standing around out the front of that particular building, BAST t-shirt on his back and a thousand-some protesters around him, his front turned towards the ranks of counter-protesters, cops, media.

The image cuts to—“ _By declaring martial law, they have taken ultimate power from the hands of elected officials—who, you know, at least in theory, should represent the people—and placed it in the hands of unelected and unknown players. In hands that wield guns and secrecy, with no accountability_ ,” says—it’s Naveen, one of the central New York BAST organisers, his curls held back from his face with a bandana, a couple days of beard growth on his chin. “ _How is this an improvement? Hydra is a symptom, not the disease_.”

The image on screen pans over the crowd of protesters, bodies crammed onto the sidewalk and spilling onto the road, a sea of faces—most of 'em dark, shades of black and brown and gold—and signs, home-painted on posterboard and bedsheets.

_HYDRA DIDN'T KILL HER,_ reads one sign, the words blazed across the smiling school photograph of Gracie Maxwell, the kid whose murder by a Louisiana cop birthed the first BAST protest.

“Rolling protest, round the clock,” Sam murmurs—he’s sat on the sofa, hunched, chin on one hand, watching closely. “They must have organised folks in shifts, get that many bodies there—gotta work around jobs, childcare.”

Steve has fought in literal military campaigns with less coordination and cooperation than a BAST operation.

“They’re not wrong,” Steve says, leaning against the back of the sofa. “Hydra—they’re a sickness, but they never shoulda been able to spread this far—the cops, the politicians, the FBI. SHIELD. I woke up in 2012 and they tried to tell me they’d made a whole new world while I was gone. No more fascism, no more racism, no more segregation…”

Sam snorts, gets up. “If your organisation has the kinda values and goals where you can be seamlessly infiltrated by a secret society of white-supremacist science Nazis—well, I got some bad news for you about your organisation.”

Fuck.

“Took me too Goddamn long to figure that one out,” Steve says.

He’d banked _everything_ on SHIELD, on Peggy’s life’s work, because he’d needed to believe that there was some kinda hope that the world would be able to respond, to fight back, when Thanos the Titan and his armies drop outta the sky.

So he’d turned a blind eye to—to the gross overreach of surveillance, into people’s lives, their home, their fuckin’ _pockets_. To the secrets and lies, one story for the people behind the curtain and another story for everybody else, the rest of the Goddamn population. To the growing concentration of firepower and tech in SHIELD’s hands, without a whole lotta oversight.

Because it was convenient for him.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, but he’d been 230 pounds of prime fatheaded idiot.

The TV news has cut back to the studio anchors—one of ‘em, the younger dame, is anxiously spinning out the usual bullshit concerns about protesters blocking the flow of traffic, hypothetical emergency vehicles not getting through, and Sam sneers and then stretches, yawns, turns away. “Coffee?”

Does—does this suite have a kitchen? Or—just, wait—

“What time is it?” Steve asks, after a too long silence, staring at the wall, because coffee sounds good but also he should probably get some calories on board that don’t come in caffeinated beverage form and his body clock is so fuckin’ disoriented by exhaustion and shapeshifting and the lightshow spilling through the curtains from outside.

“One AM,” Sam answers, and when Steve keeps looking helpless he adds, “Tuesday the 28th. Coffee or sleep, brother, pick one. You look like patient zero in a zombie movie.”

“Thanks,” Steve replies, and it’s one part sarcasm and one part deadly fuckin’ earnest. The fact that Sam is even here, in the middle of this shitstorm and holding it together in spite of everything, is nothing short of Goddamn miraculous.

And—and the doorway through to the second bedroom opens and Clint emerges, tac suit on and his bow and quiver strapped to his back. The HammerTech gun is holstered at his thigh where his HK P30 oughta be. He’s got the brow-notched, distant-gazed kinda look that he gets when he’s sighting on a target most of a mile away, a pared-down bone-sharp concentration.

Natasha snakes out of the room after him, her hands restlessly closing into fists and then opening again, face the professional blank that’s untouchable as the surface of the moon.

“You ready?” Steve asks.

Clint nods, clipped. “It’s—what, a couple hours’ drive? What can go wrong?”

“Well,” Sam drawls. “Now that you’ve said that…”

Clint can’t use Natasha’s photostatic veil, is the long and short of it. The veil only covers the face, the facial features. It can’t change skin colour, hair colour. Can’t hide the shape of your ears, which—the human ear is as unique to each living soul, in shape and size and curvature, as a fingerprint. And Clint’s hair is cut military short and tight, no coverage and no mercy, and not even in Atlantic City can they source a decent wig at this hour.

Means they can’t use the photostatic veil. Means they’ve gotta rely on Steve’s seemings, which—which are watertight and foolproof right up until some fool bumps into you on a street corner, zigs when they shoulda zagged, and then—

And then Clint’s left standing, unveiled and exposed, in the middle of one of the most densely surveilled, densely populated cities in the Goddamn world. At which point Hydra—

Christ, it’s a risk. But they’re running outta cards to play—it’s a risk they’ve gotta take.

“C’mere,” Steve says, and Clint steps up into his space, stands square, half-braced like he’s expecting to feel something, anything, when Steve—

Steve lays his hands on Clint’s shoulders and closes his eyes and conjures up a seeming. Plunges deep into the pit of his belly and hauls the power up with clawed hands, grasping—Mother of God, his head hurts—he’s gotta heave and shove, force the magic into the right shape, down the channels sorcery has dug into his brain—like he’s ripping the new skin off a wound—and his humming, his voice as he sings the spell into place is thin, rasping.

And—and then the lock clicks, the joint pops back into place, the pressure shifts and—and done, and Steve lets go, steps back, staggers.

He’s—knees folding like a bad hand of cards—

—and he can see Clint lunge to catch him, thoughtless and automatic as breathing, concern in the lines of his face—of Lennie Krevenac’s face, how he’d looked last time Steve’d seen him in 1942, heavy ink-black brow and his long nose crooked where it’d broken and set wrong—

“ _Don’t touch_ ,” Steve yelps, turning the stagger into a lurch backwards and then—and then warmth at his back, an arm under his shoulders, stink of sweat and the gas station spray-on deodorant they’re all sharing—Sam, shoring him up.

“Don’t touch,” Steve says to Clint again, and he’s slurring some—“Touch is a dealbreaker. Pops the spell like a bubble.”

“I know,” Clint snaps. “I know that, just—your face is leaking.”

My face is—and then the tacky wet taste of iron hits Steve’s upper lip and—oh. Nosebleed. Hasn’t done that for a while.

Jesus Christ, he’s burning life force. Burning the candle at both ends and up the middle. He needs to _stop_ , needs to rest before the cup runs dry and his meatsuit quits on him—and there are fascists with mind control tech running the country, so.

“Okay, Rogers?” Sam is asking, and—

“I’m okay,” Steve lies, pushing forward and getting his feet under him again—he’s shaking, an old building over a fault line. Exerts some Goddamn will to make his eyes focus, levels his gaze at Clint. “You good?”

“I’m good,” Clint says, poking with careful fingertips at the meat of his face. “Am I pretty?”

“You’re gorgeous,” Natasha says, immediate, bone-dry. “Don’t stop moving until you get to Stark Tower. Tony will have his guys keep the delivery dock open for you—”

—and she’s moving, they’re moving, Natasha and Clint heading for the front door of the suite, Natasha glancing back as she rounds the corner, studying Steve for a snatched half-second, and then—

Muffled sound of the door closing.

Hawkeye is moving out, HammerTech gun at his thigh. New York City, Manhattan, Park Avenue, Anthony Edward Stark.

Game pieces in motion. Dice rolled. Gotta hope it doesn’t come up snake eyes.

Soft wet patter of—great, he’s bleeding on the carpet. There goes the—deposit, or however the Hell they’ve secured this place—stolen a reservation, stolen someone’s ID, made some hotel desk clerk an honorary Avenger—

“Christ,” Steve mumbles, pinching his nose to stem the tide—world is swimming, grey soup around the edges of his gaze, and Sam’s arm is back around his shoulder again, propping him up, the last tent pole holding everything together.

“Think I oughta sit down,” Steve says to Sam, and—

“You _think_?”

*******

Steve wakes to the feel of metal clamped around his left wrist and—

—and for a second he’s bled cold and bright as a diamond cutting edge, heart lurching in his chest because he’s being cuffed, he’s caught, Hydra are here and—

—and then he recognises the feel of metal plates, finger joints, the grinding wailing song of a train screaming down ice-slick tracks and steel blades cutting through bone.

Bucky. It’s Buck.

Cracks an eye open—blur of white, shapeless, bright as phosphorus against his retinas and he flinches, closes again. Feels with his right hand for—Bucky’s hand, wrist, metal lukewarm and vibrating ever so slightly, like there’s some kinda tiny engine purring away in there.

Bucky is—fingers pressed to Steve’s pulse point in his wrist. And Steve’s next out-breath comes—shaky, stuttering, clamping down hard on the hot tight weight in his chest like he’s gonna sob.

Buck always used to—whenever Steve got sick. Or when he got hurt bad, on the front. And he’d wake up to Bucky, sprawled sleeping in a chair next to Steve’s bed, or curled up atop the blankets at Steve’s hip like a dog, fingertips hovering over Steve’s pulse in his wrist like it’s a lullaby, sent him off to sleep. And Steve—

For a wild second he’s convinced he’s gonna open his eyes and see Sergeant James Barnes, wolf-grey eyes and blue peacoat, his short hair rough with finger-combing. Or maybe JB Barnes, home from a shift at the docks in his suspenders and undershirt, a day’s stubble on his jaw. And then—

And then his brain wakes up some and—fuck. Jesus Christ, he’s—

He’s standing over an empty grave, keening and wailing and ignoring how the guy’s been standin’ right next to him the whole time. He can’t—

He can’t keep grieving the loss of Bucky Barnes. It’s spitting in the face of God, or the Devil, or whichever cosmic _fuck_ is to blame for this sick kind of miracle, Lazarus risen from the dead with a new name.

It’s spitting in the face of Buck himself—who is _here_. Changed, down to his steel-plated spine, but here.

Steve knows about changing. It’s too Goddamn rich he can’t face it in anybody else.

Enough with the fuckin’ widow’s weeds. Enough Goddamn pining.

Steve opens his eyes again. Blinks, hard, until the sea of white swims around into shapes, colours: the white of the tiles, bathroom walls. More white, mounded up towels on the floor, somethin’ like a bedroll underneath him. Underneath them. And the Winter Soldier, hazy around the eyes like a fog rolling over the city, watching Steve sleep from maybe a foot away.

Any kinda sensible person would find that view terrifying, but then Steve has some kinda gap where his genetic allotment of _sensible_ oughta be.

“Hey,” Steve croaks, wets his lips, gives Bucky’s metal hand a squeeze. “You okay, pal?”

Bucky lifts his right hand up to eye height, holds it flat as a blade. He’s shaking, fine tremor broken up by twitches every couple seconds.

“Got the drinkin’ man shakes,” he rasps. “Hope you don’t wanna stick me behind a rifle anytime soon.”

“Wasn’t planning to,” Steve says, closing his eyes and focusing up on his breath, drawing awareness from the inflow of breath to his lungs, his heart, his centre, widening the circle, checking in.

He’s tired, still. Dog-tired. Sore like bone-deep bruising in his pelvis and up the length of his spine, the energy channels through his body aching with misuse. His Goddamn legs hurt like—like he’d force-marched fuckin’ miles through the night to drag his carcass to Atlantic City.

Right about now—

Any other day, he’d be shifting shape right about now. Changing over to his Cap shape to get out from under this Christ-forsaken magic hangover. But—but last time he’d worn that particular outfit in front of Bucky, it’d ended with rib fractures and internal bleeding, a metal fist in Captain America’s big dumb face. And Bucky—

“Ain’t puked for more’n an hour, now,” Bucky’s saying. “Taking my wins where I can get ‘em.”

“Fine pair we make,” Steve says, opening his eyes again. Buck’s staring up at his shaking meat hand, mouth curved down like his flesh and bones are a car engine not working up to spec.

He’s paler than he oughta be, deep shadows under his eyes and more’n a week’s worth of beard growth on his chin and running down his neck. Grey Walmart-brand T-shirt is more sweat-stained than not.

Steve would absolutely still crawl all over him like an ugly rash, but—but he’s not gonna. He’s fucked this up once already. Won’t risk becoming one more name in the long-ass fuckin’ list of people who have abused Bucky Barnes.

And there’s—it’s a distant tugging at his awareness, like movement on the periphery of his vision but—but it’s not his eyes. It’s his hearing, his fuckin’ ESP, his sense of—of the magic, the music, there’s—

—lurching, wild spikes of sound, louder and more chaotic than it oughta be, and—he closes his eyes, cocks his head, listens.

Cello. Deep, sobbing notes, and then shrieking like a gutted horse.

Sharon Carter.

Fuck.

Steve rolls over, out of the towel nest—elbows and knees biting against the tile floor—shoves himself up to his feet. Fucking Christ, he hurts like an old man—he _is_ an old man. Ninety-six in July, and here’s one in your eye to every doctor who ever predicted he wouldn’t live to see thirty.

Bucky is hauling himself up to sitting, watching him, eyes half-narrowed and mouth a flat line.

“I…” Steve starts, stops, waves a hand at the door, the room beyond, the rest of the suite. “Perimeter check. You drinking enough of that… electrolyte stuff?”

Bucky sneers like a Goddamn movie star and waves his trembling hand at the boxes of electrolyte replacement bullshit on the bathroom counter. “Tastes like trench foot. Yeah, I’m drinking it. Sir.”

The hydration drinks, the protein bars—Sam’s idea. They don’t have access to the kinda drugs that’ll dial down Buck’s withdrawal symptoms—there’s nothing calibrated for a super soldier metabolism at the corner pharmacy. So if he… If he starts having seizures, or seeing God in the tiled walls, they’re screwed. But the vomiting and the shits—that they can keep on top of.

Electrolytes, simple sugars and protein. It feels like using chewing gum to shore up a leak in the Hoover Dam, but it’s what they have, what they can do.

Steve tosses Buck a sloppy salute and slopes out of the bathroom, out into—main room, the sprawling living area of the suite, carpet soft underfoot. The TV is still on, muted, rolling coverage of the BAST protest at HammerTech, all fury and no sound.

Seven forty-two AM, according to the banner bar across the bottom of the TV screen. There’s a Sam-shaped mound of blankets snoring on the sofa. There’s—Steve cocks his head, listens careful.

No sound of intruders, no STRIKE-SHIELD- _fuckin’-Hydra_ music. No unfamiliar songs. Himself, Sam, Buck, Carter—her song is violence, throbbing like a knife wound, fast and sloppy and _loud_ —and the carpet-wallpaper-plumbing-wiring-brick-tile-cleaning chemicals songs of the suite. Traces of song from the last folks who stayed here, from the last lady to clean these rooms.

No threat. Other than the one locked down in the ensuite, anyway.

He lets his hand drift down from the knife sheathed at the small of his back and pads on bare feet through to the master bedroom, to the ensuite bathroom, to—

Sharon Carter is—Mary, fucking Mother of Christ.

She’s on her back on the bathroom floor, bare feet braced up against the lip of the sink, pulling at her cuffed wrists, her body one convulsive surge of muscle and bone and tendon straining, tearing.

There’s a thin line of blood rolling down one forearm where the metal has chewed its way into flesh. She’s ghost-pale, white teeth gritted, bared, and—

“Jesus Christ, _stop_ ,” Steve blurts, lunging forward to grab—and then stopping, just outta her reach, because he’s got a couple weapons on him, a set of lock picks, and—and if he were gonna try and escape, if it were him cuffed to a bathroom sink, he’d do somethin’ just like this. Give ‘em a reason to come close, get ‘em inside of grabbing range.

“Stop, Sharon, you’re…” Steve says, breaks off, helpless to finish that Goddamn sentence.

_You’re hurting yourself_? Think she already knows that, wise guy.

Carter makes a broken noise in the back of her throat and sags, limp as cooked spaghetti, dull _crack_ of the back of her skull hitting the floor.

“ _Shit_ ,” she breathes out, and then—and then uncoils one leg, up and straight, snaps it down hard and fast to slam her heel into the rim of the sink.

“ _Shit_ ,” she howls, and then—and then her face is caving in, lips pulling back from teeth and eyes slamming closed and—and she goes to cover her face, to hide, hands moving up automatic, thoughtless—

—catching on the handcuffs.

She can’t hide, can’t have even that much privacy, and she’s writhing, turning her face away as much as she can as the wavering moan falls outta her mouth, breaks into sobs at the end. Her face is wet with tears.

God Almighty.

“Sharon,” Steve says. Helpless. Fuckin’ braindead. He drops into a squat, forearms resting on his knees—he can’t make himself get closer, because this—this could still be a trick, a trap, and—

“Hey,” he says, like some kind of idiot, because what in the Christ are you supposed to say at a time like this? What the fuck can he possibly say?

Fuck. Steve takes a breath, works through the conjuring gestures with both hands. Keeps breathing, slow and controlled. Stares at the tiled wall and waits—he can’t leave, can’t just walk outta there. Not if this was an escape attempt, not if—waits, through the hitching sobs, convulsive, shaking, the long breathless keen.

Waits, and gives her as much Goddamn privacy as he can, and breathes, until the sobbing has shifted to gasping, to silent tears.

Steve stretches over, grabs a handful of toilet paper from the roll and awkwardly tosses it so it lands on her chest. Says, “Hey. Can you—can you try and take a breath for me?”

Carter sobs again, and then—and then a mongrel bark of weeping laughter, which is about how dames have traditionally responded to Steve suggesting just about anything—but then she breathes, slow and deliberate, hitching and wet on the out breath but—but breathing. Her hand finds the pile of toilet tissue. Other hand drifts up to the sink, to the downpipe, and she hauls herself up to sitting.

“Was that an escape attempt?” Steve asks, pitching his voice low and easy. “Or—or did you just want to…”

He stops, wets his lips, closes his eyes. “To hurt yourself.”

Carter snorts, shakes her head and smears at the tears in her eyes with the toilet paper. At the blood on her forearm. There are twin bands of raw pink around each wrist. They’ll need dressing, something on ‘em.

She didn’t—her thumbs. Hands are intact, whole. She didn’t dislocate her thumbs. Means she wasn’t trying to escape, not in earnest.

“I need to know Hydra’s not pulling your strings right now,” Steve says.

Sharon shakes her head, bites at her lip.

“That was all me,” she says, low and wet, and then—

“I was so Goddamn sure it was Barnes.” Her gaze is bouncing around, on the far wall and on her cuffed hands and on the floor and into his eyes, searing, flayed raw. “I was ready to _condemn_ him for what Hydra did to him, and it turns out I’m not any different, I— _shit._ ”

She looks away again, jaw working, choking back a sob, or a cry, or a scream, or—

“They _put things in my head_ ,” she grits out. “And I sold us all out to Rumlow and Hydra and I felt _good_ , like I got a fucking dopamine dump out of—how the Hell am I ever meant to trust my own brain again?”

“I don’t know. I’m so sorry, Sharon,” Steve murmurs. It’s so fucking inadequate as an answer that it’s Goddamn laughable, but he doesn’t fuckin’ know. He doesn’t have any answers for this, for violation on this kinda scale.

Natasha, she would know—the Red Room played with her brain like Goddamn silly putty. Or Sam—Sam’s got answers for just about anything, or—or Clint, after Loki rearranged the contents of his head with that fucking sceptre. Just about anybody’d better geared to help with this, to—

“I think I killed Coulson,” Sharon blurts.

Steve—freezes. He’s distantly aware of the harsh wet tide of Sharon’s breathing, the violent pulses in her song, cello notes sobbing and lurching.

He’s thinking about Phil Coulson’s face, the final frames of the recording he sent out over SHIELD’s internal servers. How he’d looked away from the camera, made eye contact with—with someone at the door, a colleague, a friend, the lines of his face softening because he knew that he was safe, he knew—

“You can’t tell them,” Sharon is saying. “Romanov and Barton. You can’t—”

“No,” Steve says, immediate. “No, we can’t…”

Can’t tell ‘em. Not right the Hell now, not when the world is on fire.

They need to—everybody needs to be eyes up, focused on the enemy, on bringing down Hydra. Focused on the endgame. They’ll—they _deserve to know_.

Just—they’re professionals, but they’re human, both of ‘em. And they’d have died in Coulson’s place, if they could have. So—

Grief makes people dumb.

They can’t afford _dumb_. Not right now.

Steve clears his throat, takes a breath slow and careful and lets it out. Shifts on his heels and then drops down to sit on the tiles. Sharon is watching him, cinnamon-dark eyes darting, like she’s waiting for him to pronounce the date and time of her execution. Steve asks, “You—you think you killed him?”

“I—” Sharon starts, stops. Takes a deep breath and tries again.

“I remember his face. Remember looking him in the eye and—and I’ve got this sense memory of—of my hand. Of my gun in my hand. I don’t…” She presses the heels of her palms to her eye sockets, digging in. “I don’t remember. I don’t know.”

And—and she could be lying. Could be establishing plausible deniability. Doesn’t read like she’s lying—her body language, her voice. Shame, anguish, fear.

Steve’s done his share of reading up about PTSD. Knows that trauma fucks with the parts of the brain that build memory. And so, apparently, does fuckin’ brainwashing.

“Were you friends?” Steve asks, and Sharon flinches like he’s kicked her, breathes out slow and shaky, lifts her hands away to answer.

“I think so? Coulson was—he kept his cards close to his chest.” She balls the toilet tissue, stares at the far wall, rubs with callused fingertips at the back of the other hand, at bruised tendon and bone. “I’d like to think we were friends.”

Steve nods, looks down at—at his hands, thumb pressing and pressing to fingertips, like he’s marking off repetitions, prayers— _let this rosary be for the soul of Philip Coulson, in nomine Patris, et Filii_ —

Stop. Curls his hands into fists. Breathes out and—and in the distance, the wood and metal click-thud of the suite’s front door closing.

Steve blinks and uncoils and—and Sharon is doing the same, face turned like she’s gonna stare straight through the wall, her eyes dark and wide, deer in headlights.

It’s—Steve snaps his eyes shut and listens: whisper-high wail punctuated by piano notes, the muting fall of snow.

Natasha is back.

*******

Natasha is back, and—

And forty-five minutes later Steve’s striding across a storm-grey strip of seaside park with a paper cup of coffee in each hand and a bagged up grilled cheese sandwich under his arm.

Dead grass camo-brown underfoot, rolling vast song of the ocean throbbing at the edge of Steve’s awareness in fluid sync with his hangover headache, and the press of cold air on his skin—his cheeks, hands, forearms. Sky is sleet-grey overhead. It’s bleak, bleak enough to chase tourists away, to empty out the beachfront so it’s just him, and Natasha, and—

Natasha looks up from—she’s pulled the magazine from one of her Glocks, discretely under the picnic table. Is counting her rounds, a callused thumb running over the smooth bases of the bullets like how Steve’s Mam would turn rosary beads over between thumb and forefinger.

Steve hoists one of the to-go cups at Natasha in greeting. His seeming is making him look like the kid pulling night shift at their hotel’s front counter, dark hair in soft curls forming an imaginary halo around his borrowed features. Natasha looks like Virginia Sichel, model for Life Drawing II, perfect figure-eight curves and ebony-dark eyes and owner of Steve’s hopeless unrequited adoration circa 1938 and ’39.

“I always liked you more than the others,” Natasha says in greeting, hand out to receive coffee—Steve’s idiot long-dead _Virginia-call-me-Ginnie-_ shaped crush flutters like a zombie moth in his ribcage—and Steve rolls his eyes and passes Natasha her drink.

“Any word from New York?” Steve asks, sitting opposite and tearing open the sandwich bag, passing half over the table to Natasha. She shakes her head in reply and takes the sandwich, eats it in three swift bites.

Last they’d heard from New York was a couple hours ago. Clint was sacked out on thousand thread-count sheets in Stark Tower, and Tony was pulling apart the HammerTech gun in his lab—he’d had a cleaning crew come through, sterilised the space so it’s clean as an operating theatre, is working out of a wheelchair. Got his robots and JARVIS doing all the lifting.

Hope to Christ that his heart, his lungs, can stand the strain. Hope to Christ he finds the answer soon, figures it out soon—

_Thud_ of a car door closing carries from the distance, and Steve sits up, looks over Natasha’s shoulder—movement.

A woman, crossing the park towards them, loose coat hiding the shape of her body, a briefcase in one hand. She’s—dark hair, low ponytail covering her ears—a cap pulled down on her brow—

“Incoming,” Steve says.

Natasha hums, takes a sip of coffee. Two fingers showing on Steve’s side of the cup—in their visual code, photographs messaged to-and-fro, two fingers means _I copy_ and also _I got this_.

The woman keeps coming—military surplus boots. Her face—not familiar. Not somebody Steve recognises. But then—but then she’s close enough to hear her song—it’s a bone-deep and vibratory hum, rising and falling slow and easy, like the deepest registers of a whale’s song, broken by the bright pops of a bike-bell ringing.

Maria Hill.

And then she’s here, sitting down real casual at the next picnic table over. Keeps the briefcase tucked under her arm. “D’you know if the tide is going out?”

Natasha blinks, straightens up, answers: “The tide has turned. Good weather for fishing.”

It’s—code phrases, code words, some kinda exchange to establish bona fides, because no one is wearing their own faces and—and no one else can pull Steve’s trick, listen for the music that makes up the fabric of their souls.

He keeps that tidbit to himself, sips at his coffee, listens to their back and forth. Watches as Hill places the briefcase on the tabletop, flips it open, pulls out a—it’s a metal box, small and neat. Like a cashbox, the kinda thing they used to carry the week’s takings down to the bank from the grocery store when he was a kid.

Hill puts the metal box on the table, flips it open. Reaches up and—and she’s peeling her photostatic veil off, away from her face, and Steve catches a glimpse of her real features, turned away, mouth a grim flat line—

“One second,” Hill says. Puts the veil in the briefcase and closes it, and then she reaches into the metal box and presses—

There’s a hiccup in the world-music. Steve feels it like a jolt in the diaphragm, like his stomach is trying to levitate up into lung-space for a half second, and then it’s done, it’s over, and—

“What was that?” Steve asks.

“Micro-EMP generator,” Hill says. “Stark’s design.”

_Electromagnetic pulse_ —“Like when a nuke detonates?”

“Minus the radioactive fallout,” Hill says, flipping the metal box closed and snapping the clasp home. “Disrupts and destroys electronic equipment over a short range. No bugs, no wires, no cameras, no cellphones—”

“No pacemakers?” Steve snaps, because—Jesus Christ, that’s dangerous. Hope to God it’s low-range enough that nobody got hurt, nothing essential fried—

“Neither Natasha Romanov nor Steve Rogers has ever been wired for a pacemaker,” Hill barks, dumping the cashbox back into her briefcase. “If you are who you’re supposed to be, there was no risk.”

“Weapons-grade paranoia,” Natasha says, approving.

“Nick Fury is only alive because of my weaponised paranoia,” Hill says, uncoiling from her seat at the other picnic table. She drops the briefcase at Natasha’s right elbow, sits down heavily alongside her. “And it still wasn’t enough.”

“Is he okay?” Natasha asks, half-turned to study Hill, and her voice comes studiously neutral but her spine is ramrod straight and—and then she holds her breath, waiting for the answer—

“He’s alive,” Hill says again. “He’ll live.”

“ _Alive_ is not the same as _okay_ ,” Steve says— _alive_ could mean just about anything.

Christ, Steve was alive under sixty feet of ice for most of a century—couldn’t move or speak or scream, but he was alive. _Alive_ ain’t any way to live.

“Picked up on that, did you?” Hill says, bleak and dry as a salt flat.

“What happened?” Natasha asks.

Hill hauls a stack of papers out of the briefcase, starts laying ‘em out on the table. She doesn’t look up from her work when she answers.

“Alexander Pierce is Hydra. Fury—he knew there were moles inside SHIELD. But he hadn’t figured Pierce. Not until we went into a meeting with Pierce and a STRIKE team tried to kill us.” She stops, presses the knuckles of her right hand to the tabletop. Breathes in and out, slow.

“We got out—I got us out. Got dark, midnight conditions. Got him somewhere safe. He’s in an induced coma, now. Best chance for his brain to heal.”

Jesus fucking Christ—Steve hears Natasha’s gut-punch out-breath, the raw edge on the in-breath that follows.

He’s—Fury is—Holy Mary, Mother of God.

They _need_ —what’s in Fury’s head. What he knows about SHIELD, its protocols and secrets and where the bodies are buried.

They _need_ Nick Fury and—if they gotta do this without him, tear Hydra down and cauterise the rubble. If they gotta navigate the tangle of lies and blood vessels where Hydra and SHIELD have been sharing a body, a heart, a brain—

Christ, his brain. That’s—if you shot Nick Fury’s leg off, he’d be issuing orders and bitching you out from a wheelchair two days later. But his brain, his head— _fuck_.

“Oh,” Natasha says, after a long, ugly silence, hand to her mouth because she can’t control whatever her face is doing right now, and then she closes her eyes and breathes deep, slow, in and out.

“Yeah,” Hill says, lips pinched to a bloodless line, and her hands falter, shaking, over the papers, and then—and then she takes a breath, pulls another sheet of paper out—it’s weapon specs, side view like a surgical window into the belly of some kinda rifle, and—

“Here,” she says, and it comes out rasping. Clears her throat and starts again. “Here—Hydra is using Loki’s sceptre to create weapons of mass destruction. They’re using the measurements and specs we generated in Project PEGASUS, when SHIELD had the Tesseract.”

“It’s not WMDs,” Natasha replies. She’s speaking slow, quiet, like her voice is coming over some vast distance, hollowed out. She’s pale as curdled milk. Closes her eyes for a second and—and then her hand comes down from her mouth and she speaks again, deliberate. Clear. “It’s mind control. Handheld instantaneous brainwashing tech.”

Hill stops, still as a cadaver. The line of her shoulders drops, sags, like she’s shouldering a new weight. “Jesus Christ.”

Hill has intel; so does Natasha, so does Steve. They piece it together—weapons, the sceptre, Secretary Pierce of the Goddamn WSC, unauthorised experiments and misfiled paperwork and lies and bullshit, weapon designs going to HammerTech for mass manufacture, away from SHIELD oversight—

“Fury hired the mercenaries,” Hill says, and—holy _fuck_. The money, coming from someone high up in SHIELD—they’d been eyeballing Pierce for the mercenaries, the Detroit factory op, but—“He needed an excuse to get people he could trust inside that factory, confiscate those weapons before they rolled out the factory door,” and—

“A shipment of over fifty crates left the factory a week ago,” Hill is saying, flipping up a sheaf of black and white photos—HammerTech trucks, STRIKE vans driving escort, footage ripped from traffic cameras.

Steve’s gut goes to mercury, liquid-slick and cold and spilling down into his pelvis, his bladder—Jesus Christ, that’s hundreds of those weapons.

That’s—put ‘em in Hydra’s hands and God only knows how many people they’ve already brainfucked in the last seven days.

They’re too late. By now there could be thousands of people—like Sharon, like Buck, dancing to Hydra’s tune like puppets—

“The shipment went to Ivy City,” Hill says. “And they haven’t come out again. Reports are confused—SHIELD is a mess, all my intel from the inside is hearsay based on hearsay. Apparently the armoury is sealed from the inside, a doomsday protocol. Some kid agent has locked herself in there and is refusing all orders. I don’t know if she’s Hydra, or SHIELD, or something else altogether—”

“Son of a bitch,” Steve wheezes. “It’s Tan.”

“It’s who now?” Natasha asks, and—

“Tan,” Steve says again, like it’s gonna be any clearer the second time around, and then he’s explaining, punched-breathless—Bucky’s isolation cell, Agent Tan on the security detail, and her look of revulsion when she’d realised Sitwell was Hydra. And then Steve and Clint telling her—

“—that she should go to ground somewhere safe and trust nobody, until we’d finished cleaning house.”

And she’s done exactly that. The armoury is all of one floor up from the detention level. God _Almighty_. Of all the places in the world she coulda gone to ground—

“Are you really telling me that the only thing keeping Hydra from brainwashing the whole Eastern seaboard is some junior SHIELD agent with a stash of MREs who—what, decided she liked your attitude when you jailbroke the Winter Soldier from our detention cell?” Hill asks, her voice robotic, inflectionless.

“Sure looks that way,” Natasha says, and—

“There’s no other way forward,” Steve is saying.

They’ve been going over this ground for most of an hour now, working the problem and working over it again, trying to find an answer that doesn’t—

“We can keep taking their toys away from them. Destroy the weapons, destroy the factory. Doesn’t _matter_ as long as Hydra have the plans, the _sceptre_ —they can move to a manufacturing facility in Madripoor, and then it’s game over. For all we know they’ve done it already. It’s not enough to keep chopping off heads: we need to bring down Hydra. And we can’t do that with the three of us.”

Hill closes her eyes, steeples her hands over her mouth. Natasha shifts, turns over a set of schematics, says, “So we expose Hydra. Expose the threat. So it’s not the three of us. It’s thousands, it’s worldwide, aware of the threat and responding.”

“And we cripple SHIELD,” Hill says. “This will tear us apart. There has to be a way to expose Hydra that doesn’t mean—”

“There’s no time,” Steve says. “Maybe, if Fury was—”

—and he almost says _alive_ , bites the word back outta the air at the last second—

“If Fury was awake, with what he knows, we could untangle SHIELD and Hydra, cut them off. Bring them down, _and_ protect SHIELD. But we don’t have Fury, and we don’t have time. Hydra are running SHIELD _now_ , and SHIELD is running the country. We need to do this.”

And Steve—he’s bet _everything_ on SHIELD. Given the sweat of his brow, given blood. He’s lied and stolen and killed for SHIELD, because Thanos is coming, the Titan and his armies, and SHIELD is—was—their best hope for a global threat response.

But they can’t—can’t risk leaving any place for Hydra to hide. Any fertile soil. They’ve gotta salt it all.

Which means bringing down SHIELD.

Which means if Thanos comes tomorrow, he’ll find the world defenceless.

Means Steve’s a Goddamn idiot, has spent the last two years bleeding and sweating and killing to further the agenda of Nazis, and _fuck_ if that don’t sting.

“We have to expose SHIELD,” Natasha says. “Every file, every bit of data. Leave them nowhere to hide.”

Hill makes a noise, low in her throat, one part growl and one part groan. Closes her eyes. She’s silent for a long moment, and then—

And then she straightens up, fists her hand on the tabletop. Says: “SHIELD’s secured files can only be accessed from the Triskelion. We’ll need biometrics from two Alpha level members to unlock the encryption.”

She’s on board. Thank Christ for that, thank God she’s—they can do this. Between them, there’s some kinda chance in Hell they can pull this off.

“I can get Fury there,” Hill is saying. “He’s already set up for transport, in case we need to bug out. It’ll be—risky,” and given what Steve knows about Maria Hill, when she says _risky_ what she means is _fuckin’ demented—_ “But they sure as Hell won’t be expecting it.”

“Fury and Pierce,” Natasha says, staring into the mid-distance like she’s mapping it out in her head.

“Pierce would work,” Hill says, shifting her weight in the chair to cross her legs. “In theory. Give him an incentive to play along, shove his face against the reader. But I’m having a bitch of a time getting a clear pattern on his movements over the last few days, and he’s rarely at the Triskelion. If we make our move, time it wrong, we miss him—”

“Then you and Fury are hanging in the breeze in a building full of enemy operatives,” Natasha muses, mouth pulling to the side and gaze distant, turning over the puzzle in her head.

“So—the biometrics. We just need Pierce’s eye?” Steve asks, and he’s thinking—of Loki, of his Da in Stuttgart, the stolen iridium behind a biometric sealed door, a stolen eyeball. Thinking about the limits of just _how much_ Steve can heal with his shapeshifting and—

“Just the eye,” Hill confirms.

“Does it need to be in his head at the time?”

There’s a heartbeat of silence, and then—

“Gruesome,” Natasha says, and her lips are tugging into a smile that bares a flash of teeth.

“The biometric scanner reads for the movement of blood through the micro vessels inside the eye,” Hill says. “So you couldn’t just thrust a corpse in front of the thing and gain access. But—there are ways around that. Tools. If you can get me an eyeball, I can make it work.”

“Are you planning to magic one up?” Natasha asks.

Steve hesitates for half a second, chewing over the words, over—“Sure, let’s say that.”

“That wasn’t a _yes_ or a _no_ , Rogers,” Natasha says, crossing her arms on the tabletop and leaning into her elbows.

“I’m providing you guys with plausible deniability,” Steve says. “Also, it’s pretty Godawful, so I figured maybe you didn’t wanna know.”

“Well, now I feel like I need to know,” Hill says, picking up Natasha’s coffee and taking a swig.

Steve tells them the plan. Halfway through, Hill reaches into her briefcase and pulls out a flask, pours a good slug of somethin’ stronger than coffee into the to-go cup.

“I should not have asked,” she says, low and flat as a salt pan, after Steve finishes talking.

“But you did,” Natasha says. “And now we’re both burdened with this knowledge.”

She steals her doctored coffee back, has a long drink, turns to Steve. “You are profoundly disturbed. I’m here for that. Let’s go do the job.”

********

After he’s done, Steve picks up the bowl of ice in trembling hands, turns carefully in place, steps over the smears of blood on the tiled bathroom floor, and the bowl is sticking to his skin where his hands are tacky with—drying dark red-brown, stink of iron and copper, his every nerve ending humming like struck piano wires with the echo-memory of pain—not his pain, not _this body’s_ pain, but—

Natasha is waiting in the bathroom doorway, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed like she’s waiting for a bus, and she’s half a shade paler than she was twenty minutes ago but her poker face hasn’t shifted, doesn’t shift as she reaches and takes the bowl outta Steve’s hands.

Looks down into the bowl—chunky slick cubes from the hotel ice machine and smears of blood, and the trailing white of the optic nerve, startled blue punch of the iris—and then she looks back up at Steve, studies his face.

His two eyes. Whole and intact, lupine, inhuman. Sheet of drying blood down the right side of his face, glued to his skin through the shapeshift, left behind from where he—where he—

“Growing up in the decadent cultural vacuum of America,” Natasha murmurs, mouth quirked to the side. “Did you ever learn the myth of the Viking God, Odin?”

For a good couple seconds, Steve’s heart convulses like a pigeon trying to flap its way free of an owl’s talons. Like every fibrous strand of cardiac muscle is freestyle dancing to its own rhythm at once.

Odin is—he ain’t just a mythic character. He’s Steve’s absent fuckin’ _grandfather_ , for the love of all that is good and holy—but no one on Earth knows it, because if they knew that, they’d have to know that Loki is Steve’s Da.

And if they knew Loki is his Da, they’d know the New York job, breaking Loki outta SHIELD’s underground pokey, was an inside job.

And if they knew that, Steve’d never see the Goddamn light of day again. His Goddamn life depends on people never looking close enough at him, at Loki, to see the family resemblance.

So Natasha says _Odin_ and Steve locks down so hard and fast it’s like his blood has turned back to icy slurry, like he’s carved outta cast-off marble and spite, only—only she’s not—the eye. It’s not about a family resemblance, it’s just—just the eye.

Like the one Odin carved out of his own head, so goes the story. Sacrificed to the Well in the underbelly of the world, in exchange for—

“I don’t think there’s a whole lotta _wisdom_ to be found in SHIELD’s encrypted files,” Steve says, and he’s fronting like fury, holding himself together at the seams with chewing gum and twine because Christ, his fuckin’ _chest_ hurts almost more’n his face does after that, and his voice comes out robotic, serial killer calm—

“I’m not interested in wisdom,” Natasha says, mouth quirked into a half-smile. “Truth. An eye, for the truth.” She looks back down at the bowl, tilts it meditatively to watch the ice shift, says: “I’ll get this to Hill. You’re on cleanup.”

And then she’s gone, sauntering out toward the front room, and Steve looks back at—at the smears of blood on the floor, his bare feet outlined in white and crimson, red handprint on the edge of the sink, the startled exclamation point spatter of blood on the mirror where he’d leaned close, peered hard into his—into Pierce’s lined face and denim blue eyes to be sure he had the scalpel in just the right spot and—

He’s probably in shock. Can feel the chariot of his awareness humming at the edges of his skin like he’d like to bail outta his meatsuit and not be Steve-shaped for a while.

And he’s got a whole lotta shit to do, so instead he’s gotta—

“Christ on a bike,” Steve says, and starts cleaning up his mess.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content / body horror briefing, read for chapter spoilers:
> 
> Steve shape shifts, and then cuts out an eye for spy purposes, and then shape shifts back to repair the damage. None of this happens 'on screen', but rather the aftermath is described.
> 
> If you've got squick-switches around eye damage stuff, this scene takes place at the very end of the chapter, and the paragraphs to skip lightly across are:
> 
> [immediately after Natasha] "takes the bowl outta Steve's hands."
> 
> Skip the next x1 paragraph, which describes the eye itself, and then later in the scene, approx 10 paragraph breaks later:
> 
> "And then she’s gone, sauntering out toward the front room, and Steve looks back..." Again, just skipping across this x1 paragraph, which teeters at the edge of describing the self-surgery process itself.
> 
> Steve is more-or-less dissociating his way through the whole process, so nothing is described in much detail.


	17. Chapter 17

Oh-six-hundred on Wednesday the 29th of January, nine days after Justin Hammer should have been sworn in as President of the United States and seven days since whatever was left of the government declared martial law, with SHIELD at the top of the dog pile and Hydra nested inside ‘em like one of those Russian matryoshka dolls, and Steve is—

Steve is standing on the landing skid of an ink-black Stark Industries helicopter, watching the funhouse mirror version of a night sky shift and ripple below—headlights, taillights, streetlights, points of white and red and gold light against the night black of houses, tarmac, concrete.

Detroit, Michigan. Home of the Tigers, and the Pistons, and also HammerTech’s largest manufacturing and processing plant.

It’s been eight days since Steve dropped outta God’s heaven like a rock through their factory skylight, turned a siege into a pitched battle. Thought he was going in after Hydra, but it turns out Hydra were the guys in the STRIKE uniforms who were at Steve’s back.

He screwed that call up, good and fuckin’ thorough.

Surveillance photos show HammerTech haven’t got around to fixing the glass yet. It’s been a Helluva week, and—

“ _Coming up on the drop point._ ” The pilot’s voice is just audible in his earpiece, past the mechanical roar of helicopter blades churning overhead, and Steve uses his free hand to tap the comms unit, a wordless blip on the channel in reply.

And the week ain’t over yet.

*******

Tuesday, midday, and what happens is—

“Okay so, good news, bad news. Here’s the deal,” Tony is saying, from the screen of Natasha’s laptop. He’s sat in a wheelchair, deep shadows under his eyes and a new gauntness to the lines of his cheekbones. There’s an IV drip hooked to the back of one hand. His fingers sketch shapes in the air, pulling up holograms—weapon schematics.

“Bad news is, I’ve got no idea how Hydra’s toy gun works.”

Steve’s heart stutters over a couple beats and then drops in his ribcage like someone’s kicked the scaffolding out from under it—Jesus Christ, if they can’t find a way to counter Hydra’s weapons, they’re fucked. The world is _fucked_ —

“I mean this is some mystical cosmic energies bullshit. I don’t have sensors calibrated to even _register_ the kind of radiation this thing gives off—is it a particle? Is it affected by consciousness? _Is_ it consciousness? Don’t get me wrong, I will find answers, but not before, say, this weekend, and I feel like we’re on something of a time crunch here.”

Good news and bad news—“So what do you have?” Steve asks.

“Good news is, breaking stuff is way easier than understanding it,” Tony says, flipping through the schematics at nauseating speed until he stops and—“Here. This chip acts as a regulator—lose the chip, the unit dumps its whole charge all at once. Then you’ve got yourself an ugly paperweight.”

Steve stares, memorising. It’s one chip of about twenty in the guts of the weapon, looks exactly like all the rest of ‘em. “That’s the one?”

“That’s the one. The surge will chew through the internal wiring. Battery won’t ever hold a charge again. You wanna take their toys away, damage ‘em beyond salvage, that’s the moneymaker right there. It’s a bitch to get to, though, you’re gonna need the world’s smallest screwdriver and a magnifying glass to access the works—”

“I’m not gonna use a screwdriver,” Steve interrupts. “I’m gonna use a hex.”

“Well, I mean, sure. That’s cheating, but okay.”

HammerTech and Hydra have had a week to keep churning out weapons. Given Tony’s best estimate, the setup at the Detroit factory, how fuckin’ fiddly their new toy is, that’s maybe a couple thousand guns sitting crated up in Michigan, ready to roll out. A couple thousand chips that want hexing.

Which is—too many chips. He can’t hex ‘em one by one—even in batches, even maybe a crate at a time, that’s gonna wipe him clean out before he’s halfway done. So he needs—

Needs a way to spill one hex out over the whole area. Like—“Like a human microphone,” Steve is saying—he’s seen BAST using the human microphone trick at some of their events—“The message gets repeated, magnified over the whole space.” And there’s only one of him, but—but Steve can bilocate, be in two places at once. So—so why not three, or four, or—

“You say human microphone,” Tony answers, shifting in his wheelchair and scratching at the dressing under his T-shirt. “I say radio repeater.”

So that’s—that’s the start of a plan, anyway; it’s a ghost of an outline of a plan.

*******

They got two targets; two fronts to this war.

The Triskelion, and SHIELD’s encrypted files—expose Hydra to the cold light of day. Expose SHIELD. And everything they’ve built on a foundation of lies and secrets comes crashing down. Hill, Natasha, Fury—strapped to a Goddamn hospital transport—and Alexander Pierce’s severed fuckin’ eyeball.

The second front is—

Hydra are fanatics, is the thing. No surrender. They aren’t gonna quietly roll over and bare their bellies when those files drop—they’ll go down bloody, clawing for purchase, drag as many people down with ‘em as they can. They’re kamikazes. And when that happens—

When that happens, they _cannot_ have access to fucking point-and-fire brainwashing tech.

Jesus Christ, the kinda damage that—Steve tries to figure what it might look like, a couple thousand Hydra agents with mind-control weapons and _nothing left to lose_.

Imagines folks lining up to jump outta twentieth story windows, their faces serenely pleasant— _I’m happy to comply_. Imagines mothers killing their children; imagines some fella walking home down any city street and stopping, turning, expression draining into that colourless car salesman look, picking up a loose brick and stoving in the next fella’s head, swift and thoughtless and smiling, smiling, and—

Whatever Steve can picture—it’s gonna be ten Goddamn times worse.

Which means they gotta turn every piece of Goddamn _compliance_ tech ordnance into so much ugly scrap metal and plastic. Gotta do it _before_ Natasha and Hill release all of SHIELD’s encrypted data into the wild.

No pressure or nothin’.

*******

The next thing that happens is—

Steve’s neck deep in a spell when the burner phone starts ringing—he can hear the furious electronic chirping like it’s coming up from the bottom of a mine shaft, distant and distorted past the surging roar of the world-music.

Past hotel suite music and Atlantic City music, earth and sky music, the song of the winter-grey sea, the soul-note hum of his spell running through all of it like hair-fine veins of metal through stone. The high ringing steel-song of the knife in his hands, the throwing blade he’s breathing his spell into, pouring on concentration like he’s trying to furl away ten feet of knotted silk back up the clown’s sleeve.

So he hears the cell phone ring. And it takes a couple minutes for the upstairs part of his brain to come online and figure maybe that’s—that he oughta do something about that—and then it stops ringing and he lets himself sink into the flow of the music again, the surge of the fires of making and unmaking flooding through his body like he’s hollow-boned as a bird, and—

The cell phone starts ringing again. _Fuck_ , okay, hang on—

He’s gotta—untangle, cast off from the spell—because there are a lotta fuckin’ moving parts in here, and if he doesn’t anchor ‘em together they’ll start to unravel, to pull in all directions, and—

And then the ringing stops again and—“This is Wilson,” Sam is saying.

Thank Christ for that, Sam’s onto it—someone’s gotta have their shit together around here.

Steve pries his eyes open and unsticks his tongue from the roof of his mouth. Stares at his fingers until he can get all the tiny muscles firing together, open up his cramped hands and put the knife down on the coffee table and then—

“It’s your redhead friend,” Sam is saying, shoving the cell phone at him, and Steve takes the phone in one bled-numb hand—like he’s picking the fuckin’ thing up with a quintet of pork sausages.

“Guh,” Steve says, like the Goddamn genius he is, and then he rubs at his mouth, remembers how his tongue oughta work, slurs out: “Widow. I’m Brooklyn.”

“ _Jersey City_ ,” Natasha answers, call and response, and then—“ _Grey Ghost,_ ” she adds, low and silken, and—

—fuck.

She’s figured it out, then, Steve’s—uh, his extracurricular activities. Who needs hobbies when you have PTSD and sorcery-fuelled vigilantism?

This was—this was gonna happen, sooner or later. Now that they know about his sorcery, someone was always gonna draw a line connecting him to the weird magic-using vigilante operating in D.C. and New York. He ain’t exactly done much to throw off the trail.

What’s the proper social protocol for responding when a friend figures out your _secret_ secret identity? “What’s your sitrep?” Steve asks.

“ _Almost home now_ ,” Natasha says—she and Hill are heading to some need-to-know-only base Fury had set up, off SHIELD’s books, a black site so black it draws in light. Gonna collect the man himself, tote his comatose carcass along like a huge and incredibly fragile piece of luggage when they go to the Triskelion.

“ _Listen, Hill has someone watching our friends in the Detroit facility. They sent out a truck loaded with twenty crates of materiel, about two hours ago_.”

_Fuck_. Fucking Hell on wheels, this is—this is fuckin’ _not ideal_. Every single one of those weapons is like a spark—lands in the wrong spot, in the right spot, and they’ve got a towering Goddamn inferno chewing through forests and trees and houses half a day later. They gotta know—

“Where is that truck now?” Steve asks.

“ _I’m working on it,_ ” Natasha answers, salty-crisp like she gets when you stumble on a question she doesn’t have the answer to. “ _I’m searching through about five thousand traffic cameras with my—my one bar of wireless reception. I’ll find it. You’ve gotta contain it_.”

“Copy that,” Steve says, and then—

And then when the phone rings again, an hour later—

“ _They’re on the I-80 in Pennsylvania_ ,” Natasha is saying—Steve can hear the furious clatter of her fingers on a keyboard in the background.

“The I-80,” Steve says, and he’s clawing through the back of his head for memory, his mental map of the continental United States, where the veins and arteries of interstates and rivers flow, back and forth. I-80 means—“Heading for the Triskelion? Ivy City?”

“ _They’re not coming to D.C.,_ ” Natasha says. “ _They should have turned south towards Pittsburgh by now. They’re still heading east_.”

“East?” Steve asks, mindlessly flipping the throwing knife in his hand, chewing over the map in his head again, because if you head east on the I-80 you’re not gonna hit anything major until—“New York?”

And then he blinks, and his gut goes to shrapnel and ice water, and he’s turning around, thoughtless and automatic as the needle of a compass turning to point north.

Staring at the TV on the far wall: rolling coverage of BAST’s protest outside of HammerTech. In _Manhattan_.

A concentrated collective of folks who are—loudly, body-on-the-line actively, unrelentingly—in opposition to HammerTech and to Hydra and to SHIELD.

Hundreds of ‘em. In a rotating roster, so you could get—thousands, thousands of them, point and shoot and now the loudest folks protesting against you are fighting _for_ you, or fighting each other, or lying on the ground drooling.

Silence the opposition, discredit them utterly or tear ‘em to pieces, so any thought of organising in the future—against SHIELD, against Hydra—dies bloody on the streets of Manhattan.

Naveen is there. And Amber—she’s got three kids, the youngest of ‘em two years old, and they cycle between a platoon’s worth of grandparents and aunties when she’s coming to actions. Trip will be there, and Nadya, and—

There’s a soft _thunk_ as the throwing knife rolls free of his fingers and falls neatly into the carpet point-first.

“Jesus _fucking Christ_ ,” Steve blurts.

*******

Okay, so—

So now it’s a war on three fronts.

_No fuckin’ pressure or nothin’_.

*******

He finds Sam floor-sitting with Bucky in the hall outside the bathroom.

Sam’s talking, low and easy—his counsellor voice—and sitting just outside of arm’s reach, facing the same way as Buck, like they’ve both caught the same bus, casual as anything.

“I’m not gonna pretend I know what it was like, inside,” Sam is saying, and Steve can see Buck’s listening—head cocked, jaw working, human fingers closed over his metal fist and propped up on his crooked knees. “But I know a little something about how to start picking up the pieces, after you get out.”

And Steve wouldn’t wanna interrupt this, not even for a cure for tuberculosis and a time machine, but he’s gotta—“Sam. They’re going after BAST.”

Sam jolts like Steve’s poked him with a cattle prod. His dark eyes are wild, too much white showing at the edges. “They’re—what?”

“Hydra,” Steve says. “BAST. There’s a shipment of brainwashing tech heading for Manhattan.”

There’s a heartbeat of frozen dead-quiet, and then Sam explodes up and off the floor, slapping a hand to the far wall as he lurches up to his feet. “What the fuck. What in the fascist _fuck_. Where’s the phone, we gotta—” He stops, hands nesting over his buzzed-short hair. “I don’t—my phone. I dumped my phone, I don’t have anybody’s numbers. Do you—”

Steve trashed his cellphone back in D.C. But he’s—his Cap shape. He has an eidetic memory in his Cap shape.

“Gimme a second,” Steve says, and—

In the bathroom he closes the door—because he still doesn’t know how Bucky’s gonna react to seeing him all blown-up Captain America-sized. Uses the emergency anchor at the bottom of his sternum to shapeshift in double-quick time, a hand towel clamped between his teeth to muffle the scream—

— _Jesus Christ oh Mam I’m sorry oh_ fuck—

—and then he’s big and—

He yells out instructions through the door—the laptop, they need the laptop Natasha left set up in the master bedroom, because if Hydra have eyes on BAST then chances are the organisers’ phones are all being monitored. Writes strings of numbers up on the mirror with a bar of hotel soap. Trip’s cellphone, Nadya’s cellphone, her email address.

When he emerges he’s little again, in his real body again, and Sam shoves past him, razor-focused, laptop in his hands and the secured comms program already open onscreen.

Bucky stalks up into Steve’s space, stops just outside of elbowing range.

“You screamed,” Bucky says, low and careful. His hand lands on Steve’s shoulder, clamps down for half a second, bounces away again like he’s touched a hot stove. “You’re injured?”

“I’m okay, pal,” Steve replies, and then to Sam—

“Tell ‘em they need a secured line at their end, before you can talk to ‘em.” Steve leans against the door frame, breathing through the head-rush, the bruising all-over ache of shifting shape twice inside of a minute. “Or at least an anonymous line, like a new burner, or—”

“We’ve got protocols,” Sam answers, gaze jumping from the mirror to the computer screen, and—of fuckin’ course they do. BAST has existed in vocal opposition to police violence and government overreach for almost two years—of course they’d expect monitoring, be prepared for it.

Next up, Steve can teach a grandmother how to suck eggs.

“You want in on this?” Sam asks, tilting the laptop in his hands.

“I—no. No, everybody thinks I’m dead. Or a Hydra clone. Or a dead Hydra clone.” And fuck if that don’t sting—Trip is a friend. Trip, Nadya, he’s been in the shit with ‘em, and maybe this way he doesn’t even get to say goodbye, and—and none of this is about Steve’s fuckin feelings.

“My ugly mug would just complicate the whole deal. Just—tell ‘em Hydra is coming. Tell ‘em they’ve gotta be in the wind, scatter and drop off the radar, until we can neutralise those weapons.”

“Copy that,” Sam replies, and then he’s gone, striding back toward the master bedroom with the computer, and—

“You screamed, _twice_ ,” Bucky rasps, and he’s holding himself taut as a hunting dog straining at the lead, eyes darting over Steve, head-to-toe, nostrils flared like he’s scenting the air.

“I’m not hurt, Buck,” Steve says, and then he stops. Grimaces and paws at his forehead with his knuckles—fuck. He’s being an asshole; a petty, secretive asshole, and—

And he doesn’t want secrets anymore. Not from Bucky. Not—not from any of ‘em, these fuckin’ lunatics that are somehow still his friends, despite Steve being a petty, secretive asshole. Every single lie he’s still carrying around rubs at his soul like an ill-fitting shoe, scraping at the skin of your heel with every step you take.

_What the Hell_ —worst that can happen is, what, Buck trying to kill him again? Third time it might even stick.

“I shifted shape,” Steve says.

“You—” Bucky starts, stops, and then he cocks his head and his gaze goes distant, unfocused.

“You shifted shape,” he repeats back, slowly.

“Physically,” Steve says, redundantly. “I’m a shapeshifter. It’s part of the package deal with my sorcery. Rearrange my molecules, tack on some height. And it—”

—and he’s going to say _it hurts_ , but then Bucky’s reaching out, metal fingertips brushing Steve’s cheekbone, and he freezes, breath caught in his throat like he’s swallowed razor wire.

Bucky rests the pad of his thumb under Steve’s right eye, pressure so light that it only just registers, a spot of cold stealing body heat from his skin.

“Your eyes,” Bucky breathes, and he’s making eye contact, his gaze flicking from one side to the other, studying.

Steve can feel the hairs on the nape of his neck trying to stand on end.

“Yeah, those are new,” he says, and his voice comes rasping like he’s just gargled some fine sand in the last couple minutes. Clears his throat and tries again: “New to you, anyway. Since the War—since you saw me last. Them and the—the fangs. The scars. Not how you would remember.”

Bucky’s silent, fingertips a feather-light weight against Steve’s jaw. He’s listening, watching, gaze shifting from Steve’s eyes to his mouth and back again. And then—

“You change,” he says. “I remember. Sometimes, you’re someone else.”

“I’m always me,” Steve replies. “The packaging changes, but not the—not the gooey caramel centre.”

Bucky blinks, and his hand falls away. Steve can hear his song, slowing, drawling out like syrup over steel. “Show me.”

_Shit. Ave Maria, gratia plena—Holy Mary. Mam. Whoever is still taking my calls—don’t let me fuck this up. Again._

Steve closes his eyes—he can do this eyes open, under heavy gunfire, falling through open air, while talking on the fucking phone. Doesn’t need to close his eyes for it, not anymore, but he doesn’t wanna look at Buck’s face while he’s—closes his eyes and puts his hands on his belly, low down where the well of power sits in the bowl of his pelvis.

Takes a deep breath and calls up his sorcery, the threads of fire, writhing up and through him like vines growing double-quick time, coiling around the ladder of his spine, licking across his collarbones and down his arms and—

Hums _Star Spangled Man_ , just the first couple lines, until the spell ignites and takes over, spilling and flooding through his tissue, matter, his cells, and the hum turns into a moan, gritting his teeth around it.

It burns, every damn time it burns, like he’s fallen into fire. He’s grinding out a yowl, bones creaking as they stretch and the muted butchers’ shop sound of muscle fibres tearing and tearing and—

The music cuts out to silence. The world goes dead, mechanical, soulless. Steve opens his eyes.

He’s gotta look down to meet Bucky’s gaze.

Buck’s still the same height he was fresh outta Brooklyn—oughta be taller, if he’s had some version of Erskine’s serum, but—but then there’s metal in his clavicles, shoulder blades, up and down his spine. Christ only knows how much height that’s shaved off, pulling him earthward with the weight of it.

Bucky’s staring, blinking, and—and he doesn’t look spooked. Doesn’t look like he’s gonna put his metal fist through Steve’s face again.

He’s just—processing, turning this shit over in his head to make sense of—

“Target, Level Six,” Bucky whispers. “Enhanced. Exposure threat.” He tilts his head a notch, fingers of his metal hand furling into a fist and unfurling like a flower.

Steve nods, rubs at his hairline, wets his lips—he can lie like a snake on its belly but be _fucked_ if he can think what to say right now—

“I shot you,” Bucky says. “Loading bay, under the hospital. Once between the eyes, two more in centre mass. Is that—is my memory fucked up, or—”

“No, that—that was real, you’re remembering fine,” Steve says. “But I—you shot my seeming, my—uh, my illusion. Like a hologram. It sure looked like me.”

“Jesus,” Bucky mutters, and then—“In the white cell, when—I don’t—was that an illusion, too?”

“No, that was the real me,” Steve says.

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Bucky spits, and now both hands form fists, plates of his left forearm whirring as they click into alignment. “That was—were you gonna let me _kill you_?”

“People keep askin’ like they think I got some kinda long-term plan here,” Steve says, half-turning his head and talking real fixed to the wall because he can’t—“I panicked, okay?”

“Fuck you, _I panicked_. Greatest strategic mind of our generation, my _ass_ ,” Bucky snarls, and Steve catches movement in his peripheral vision, hands moving, Bucky stepping in, and Steve turns back and—

Bucky’s catching him by the neck of his T-shirt and hauling him down, and—and he’s kissing like a ram raid, slamming their mouths together, lips open to bare his teeth and biting at Steve’s mouth, rasp of his stubble and the slick wet flash of tongue—

And back again, and Steve’s reeling like—like he’s got anaemia again, blood thin as water in his veins, and Bucky snaps, “You Goddamned idiot.”

“You don’t remember, but we’ve had this conversation once or twice before,” Steve tells him, tonguing away the smear of blood from his split lower lip.

“Stop trying to _fucking die on me_ , asshole.” Buck’s making eye contact, strong and steady like he’s built from brick, from stone, fingers of his metal hand still caught in the fabric of Steve’s shirt.

“I’m not, I promise,” Steve says. “Not anymore. I won’t—I can’t promise not to die, no man knows the hour—I won’t lie to you. But I’m not _trying_ to get killed. I’m with you ’til the end of the line, sweetheart.”

Buck goes—still, quiet, studying Steve’s face like he’s looking for poker tells.

God only knows if he remembers—Steve’s Mam’s funeral, meeting Buck after he got home from the graveside, _with you ’til the end of the line—_

“Not gonna lie to me, huh?” Bucky asks, mouth crooking into a cold kinda shark-smile, lets go of Steve’s shirtfront and takes a half-step back and—

“Never again, Buck, I swear to Christ,” Steve says. “The truth, the whole truth, and nothin’ but: I’m a sorcerer. I’m a _seidhkonur_ , and a shapeshifter, and a big fuckin’ fairy, and I moonlight as Captain America. And my Da is an alien from outer space.”

Buck’s silent, blinking, head cocked again, hint of a smile caught in the corners of his eyes—

“And I’m wanted by Interpol,” Steve adds.

Bucky blinks one last time, and then: “You and me both, boss.”

*******

The next time Steve hauls his ass up from the surge and tidal pull of his sorcery, from the gravity well of spell after spell packed into the folded steel of a throwing knife, it’s five in the afternoon and Sam and Bucky are gone.

He puts the anchor blade down, real careful, on the coffee table, parallel to the first knife like it’s a place setting. Two down, two more to get done, which means he’s got a long night ahead of him—it’s not hard work, hard magic. Not like it takes a whole lotta power and pushing and straining, a whole lotta gas. It’s just _complex_ , threads and minute fiddly pieces, like he’s piecing together the gears of a pocket watch by touch.

He’s got this fuckin’ excellent headache starting up again. Like some cute little mouse is trying to gnaw its way out through the skull just behind his right eye.

And—and the suite is quiet. Endless whining electronic song from the appliances, from the power cables in the walls. Carpet song and brick song and—and he’s up, off the sofa, lurching to his feet and looking around, looking for anybody—finding the hotel stationery pad left sitting on the end of the sofa.

_DON’T PANIC_ —at the top of the page, capitals, Sam’s chicken scratch handwriting, and then—

_Supply run. Your man wanted to stretch his legs, so he’s riding along. It’s OK, Cap, you’ve got to let your baby bird leave the nest sometime. Take a couple breaths and be cool. I am a God Damn Professional and he’s like 300 pounds of lousy attitude and a metal arm. We got this._

_Home by curfew—9pm?_

“What in God’s name,” Steve asks, staring at the paper like it’s gonna reveal its secrets if he eyefucks it hard enough. He—sifting back through his working memory of the last few hours, he’s got some vague recall of voices, of heavy treads moving through the suite, of—someone put a hand on his shoulder, at one point. The sound of doors, opening and closing.

He’d been down too deep, a hundred feet below the surface and fully occupied in the tug and flow and push and pull of the fires of making and unmaking, in his own music and the songs of the world, the earth and the sky and—so he’d missed a couple pertinent details.

But they hadn’t gone by force. He remembers that much.

Which means this is okay. This is fine, absolutely fuckin’ fine, this is—

“Jesus,” Steve wheezes, and he sits down on the arm of the sofa before his legs can go out from under him.

When Steve figures out how to get his breathing under control again—he’s gotta really focus up, clench his fists and plant his awareness into the bases of his lungs like flags planted in contested territory, pull in at the edges of his being until he’s all the way back in his skin suit and then—and then stop making those _noises_ , Jesus, wheezing and heaving and giving these strangled keening cries like a dying wolf pup and— _stop_.

Breathe the fuck in.

Breathe the fuck out.

Well, that was twenty-some fuckin’ minutes he ain’t gonna get back. Christ’s sake.

Steve scrapes himself up off the living room floor and goes to check in with Sharon.

Sharon Carter is handcuffed to the king-sized bed frame in the master bedroom. She’s sat up on the side of the bed, feet on the ground like she’s gonna spring up any second, cinnamon-dark gaze snapping to meet Steve’s as he steps through the door and—

Christ, she musta heard everything. She was less’n ten yards away, the bedroom door standing open the whole time. So she’d heard Steve having—having his asthma attack. Only—

Only it wasn’t asthma—he hasn’t had asthma since the Apple of Idunn. Since before he left Brooklyn.

Which means it was a panic attack.

Which is—fuckin’ embarrassing.

But Sharon’s meeting his gaze, steady and unblinking. He’s been witness to her breakdown, and now she’s been witness one-room-removed to his—there’s a certain ugly poetry to this.

“You know where they went?” Steve rasps.

They wouldn’t have told her—not when there’s still the risk of unexploded ordnance, more Hydra programming, inside her head. But she’s a spy, and she’s got working ears, so—

“Wilson was saying he needed to go pick something up,” Sharon answers, calm, steady, neutral eye contact, little head tilt. Truth. “Materiel, some piece of equipment. Barnes wouldn’t let him go out there without backup.”

Steve closes his eyes and just—breathes, for a second. It—that checks out. Makes sense, given—Steve won’t give Bucky orders, so he’s finding roles for himself, and _protection detail_ seems to be one of the ones he defaults to a whole lot. And Sam—Sam is _civilian, high value_ , and Steve’s friend, so—so Buck’s protection detail is gonna extend to cover him too.

And—and they’re coming back. They’re gonna keep each other safe—Sam knows about Bucky’s trigger words, he knows, and he’s a professional and it’s okay—

And they’re gonna come back. They’ve gotta come back.

Breathe out.

Steve opens his eyes.

Studies Sharon, sitting on the bed and openly studying him right back. Her hair is loose, now, kinks in the length from when it was braided. She looks tired—exhausted, down to the level of her soul. Under the handcuffs, soft flesh-pink bandaging wraps around both wrists.

“You hungry?” Steve asks.

In the kitchenette—toaster, kettle, two half-size coffee cups perched next to single-serve packets of creamer—Steve handcuffs Sharon to the mini-fridge.

Her choice—Jesus, she’d asked him to do it, which—she doesn’t trust herself. If she got loose, if some snarl of buried psychic programming rears up and hauls her back to Hydra, sock puppet compliant and smiling—with what she knows now—

So Sharon sits on the floor against the fridge and watches Steve make sandwiches—they’ve still got half a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter from the bodega up the road. If the hotel suite ever came with butter knives, they’re missing now; Steve uses a throwing blade to smear the spread around.

It’s clean. He’s ninety percent sure.

“How’re your arms?” Steve asks, once they’re both parked down on the floor tiles, sandwiches in hand.

It’s not—he wants to ask _how’s your head_ , or maybe _how are you holding up_ , and that’s not—he’s not her CO. He’s not her friend. She was his protection detail, slash fake neighbour, and then they were SHIELD co-workers for all of a couple days before Hydra mindfucked her into the ground.

She’s his prisoner, only not really, because she’s the one insisting on handcuffs.

But she’s Peggy’s people. Which means she’s Steve’s people, by default. Hey, he didn’t make the rules—he just works here.

“They’re okay,” Sharon answers, turning her wrist to study the bandaging. “Don’t hurt.” She takes a bite of her sandwich, and the links of her cuffs rattle against the fridge door.

And that’s almost certainly a lie, but Steve of all people won’t be calling her out on it. Gotta let her claim a measure of dignity back somewhere. He hums, nods, eats his sandwich and lets the silence sprawl out across the kitchen floor.

He’s focusing up on the texture of bread in his mouth, the feel of food passing through and down into his gut, on the in and out flow of his breath. Body stuff, bio stuff, because if he—if he lets himself _think_ , lets himself death spiral into the black place inside his head, it’s—bad.

Wall-to-wall Technicolor bad shit in there—

— _Sam, shoved face-first into the side of a car, gun at his head._

_Bucky, on the ground and screaming, stun batons pressing voltage into his throat, belly, groin._

_Sam, bleeding out from the scattering of bullet holes across his torso, leaving a fat stripe of red on the concrete as he tries to drag himself to safety; Buck rendered mindless like an unmourned ghost, slate-grey eyes fixed and staring, hollowed out of soul like a picked-clean ribcage, steel and bone saw music screaming,_ screaming, drowning—

“Kinda limits conversation,” Sharon says, and the silence splits open like a suppurating wound. Her voice is light, very casual—she’s throwing him a lifesaver. Fuck, he musta—what the Hell is his face doing that she felt like she needed to—

“You know. The buried programming in my brain. It’s not like we can talk about current events.”

“Tell me about Peggy,” Steve answers, and the words come from someplace underground and fall from his tongue without even looping in his upstairs brain. “Tell me about being her family.”

Sharon blinks, once, twice, and then she quirks a smile and drops her head back against the fridge and starts talking.

“Aunt Peggy,” she says, and—and she spins it out, between bites of sandwich, pauses for breath and silence. Talks about a photograph of Peggy and JFK that sat on a bookshelf in Peggy’s home office. About how it was Peggy that bought Sharon her first concealed carry holster, as an eighteenth birthday present—and the strangled Cold War months-long family argument that followed.

“My mother—she didn’t want me to enlist. Didn’t want any of this for me,” Sharon says, and she looks down at—at her bandaged wrist, at the cuffs, like maybe for a second she’s thinking that her mother maybe had the right idea, but—

“But I always knew—I couldn’t do anything else. Aunt Peggy’s legacy, what she accomplished—I was never going to live up to that, but—if I followed, where she’d blazed a trail. Then maybe I could do something real. Change the world, even some small corner of the world, in a way that matters.”

Steve forces half a smile and looks away before it can start to curdle. Peggy, her legacy—it’s SHIELD. And if this plan works like it’s supposed to, there isn’t gonna be a SHIELD in about—fuck. Less’n eighteen hours.

_Pater noster, qui es in caelis; sanctificetur nomen tuum_ —please, Lord God. Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Mother Mary. Please, _don’t let me screw the pooch here_.

“They’ll be okay,” Sharon says into the quiet, and—Jesus, he must look fuckin’ bad if she’s trying to reassure him right now.

Sam, Bucky, going off on a side-quest, not telling a Goddamn soul what the plan is—this is a bullshit cowboy manoeuvre.

But it’s not like Steve’s got any kinda high horse to stand on and complain about that, except maybe for fuckin’ copyright infringement. Bullshit cowboy manoeuvres are two thirds of Steve’s standard operating procedure.

Keeping him safe, through the bullshit and out the other side—that was always Bucky’s.

“I know,” Steve lies, and then he jams the last hunk of sandwich into his mouth, dusts off his hands, and hauls his carcass up off the floor.

*******

Steve’s most of the way to done making the third spell anchor when Sam and Buck get back.

He’s sprawled on the floor next to the sofa, throwing blade pressed with both hands to his skinny pigeon chest and head pointed toward the front door so he’ll hear it when—and then the thud of the magnetic lock releasing and Sam’s voice, spilling into the quiet of the suite, and—and music, their songs, Bucky’s clatter of steel pulsing in sympathy with the bass guitar throb of Sam’s song.

They’re _here_ and they’re _okay_ and—

Steve casts off the threads of hex and claws his way up from the riptide pull of his sorcery, from the deep places in his brain and heart and gut where his own music blurs up against the world’s music, earth and sky and—

“Mmm,” he grinds out, jaw locked like he’s sleep-dense, and then a couple more muscle groups fire up and he’s dropping the knife on the carpet and heaving over onto his side, pointing his face at the door, blinking bleary eyes. “Buck? Sam? Y’okay?”

“We are All-American prime-rib A-okay,” Sam answers, warm and bright like he’s half a beat from laughter, and Steve catches the white flash of his grin. He’s got—goggles? Some kinda goggles pushed back on his head, straps across his shoulders like there’s something on his back, and—

Bucky drops into a squat next to Steve’s head, forearms on his knees. His hair is a Goddamn shambles, sweat-damp tangles in all directions, and his eyes are wild, wide enough to see white top and bottom.

“Steve,” he rasps. “We flew.”

“You what?” Steve asks, blinking hard—useless fuckin’ eyes—and shoving his way up to a sit. Looks again, at Bucky and then Sam, micro-examination for blood-stains or foxing at the edges or any signs of Hydra tampering— _flew_. They flew.

What does that even—“Did you crazy sons of bitches steal an aircraft?”

“Are you kidding? Of course not,” Sam says, snapping open clasps across his chest and shrugging off—it’s boxy, metal and plastic in silver and grey, vents on the back like the gills of a fish. Lets it slide down his shoulders and land on the sofa—heavy, solid, cushions sinking under the weight of it. “We’re borrowing.”

He digs into a back pocket of his jeans, hauls out a folded sheet of paper. Hands it over.

“You need air support,” he says. “Consider this my resume.”

Steve takes the paper. Cocks his head and—listens, listens to—the song is mechanical, howling and whirring and—and there’s this high over-note of sky-song, wind-song, whistling and crisp and cold as the air at thirty thousand feet.

He blinks, shakes his head and looks down at the paper—it’s schematics, a diagram, photocopy of a photocopy rough, and in the middle of the scattering of closeups and cutouts and numbers is the hollow outline of a human shape, the device strapped to its back, massive wings sprawled to either side. Like an angel.

“Holy shit,” Steve says, and—

“This is Project FALCON,” Sam says.

“We Goddamn _flew_ ,” Bucky repeats, and there’s tension at the corners of his mouth where he’s biting back a smile.

Steve claws his way up onto his feet and lurches over to the sofa. Picks up a shoulder strap, sturdy metal and rubber and—carbon fibre, looks like. Now he’s got hands on he can see it, the shape of the shoulders and the tuck of the wings inside the body of the pack.

Turns to look at Sam. “You can fly this thing?”

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” Sam says. “Hell yeah, I can.”

Steve looks at the—jetpack? The wing pack.

Looks at Sam, hands planted on hips and this look on his face like—like he’s got the winning lottery ticket in his fist, equal parts breathless high and ambition like he’s already planning out the first stupid thing he’s gonna buy.

Steve looks at Bucky, shark-satisfaction around his eyes, and—his hair is a Goddamn disaster because he flew. Through the open air. With a fuckin’ jetpack.

Jesus Christ on a crutch.

“I left you assholes alone for five minutes,” Steve says.

*******

Long story short, when Sam used to talk about _flying_ on his deployments over in the sandbox, he wasn’t talking about F22s.

Long story short, when Sam said he was going for a _supply run_ , what he meant was they were gonna buddy-cop road-trip 180-odd miles down to—

“Fort Meade,” Sam says, taking off his flying goggles and stretching out his shoulders like—like he just flew himself and 300 pounds of super soldier up a good chunk of the Goddamn Eastern seaboard. “This is the last unit they made before the DoD shut the project down.”

“Why’d they shut it down?” Steve asks, sat down on the coffee table. He can feel the radiant heat from—from the engines, or whatever—from the wingpack against his knees.

“Brass did the math, after a year in the field,” Sam says. “Decided it wasn’t viable—too much outlay in training, too much turnover—we were always sent into the worst of it, firefights and running battles where they couldn’t get choppers, couldn’t land a stealth chute. We get killed, back to square one and another four-point-five million to train up the next guy. Lives we saved didn’t add up enough to make it worth it.”

“Sounds about right,” Bucky mumbles lowly from the kitchenette, talkin’ round a mouthful of one of those Godawful protein bars.

“Yeah,” Steve says, mindless acknowledgement, because in the hollowed out gap where his brain oughta be there’s a whole lotta whirring, cogs ticking, smoke coming outta somewhere—this doesn’t—

It doesn’t add up.

He can—he can piece together _how_ they’ve done it. Took some of the veil anchors Steve prepped earlier, anchored into cheap-shit Atlantic City souvenir key chains—Steve showed Sam how to use ‘em, showed everyone, in case the shit hits the fan. It’s a mental trick, ain’t a big deal—just a pull and a twist in the mind’s eye.

So they’ve used some cocktail of veils, Bucky’s skill set, Sam’s Goddamn moxie, to break into a fuckin’ US military installation, steal some classified-to-Hell experimental flight suit tech on the way out. That part of the story he gets.

He’s not so clear on the _why_. _Air support_ , Sam said, but—but Steve’s part of the mission is infiltration, a stealth op, so—

“Sam,” Steve says. “Why are we gonna need air support?”

*******

Long story short, when Steve takes his hands off the steering wheel, this Goddamn unit goes rogue.

“Hydra’s gonna know you’re coming,” Sam is saying. “Right? Those weapons—they change the game completely. And they gotta know _we_ know about them, because you lifted one of their fancy brain-rape guns off their guy’s corpse.”

“Right,” Steve agrees, slow and cautious.

They’re sat in the corner of the living area, Steve on the fainting couch and Sam on the floor, folded forward and stretching out his back. Which is sore from flying. Because that’s a thing Sam does, apparently.

“And you’re not gonna just _Sabrina the Teenage Witch_ your way past ‘em this time,” Sam says. “Because they’re gonna be expecting you, and they know what you can do. If they got one guy with thermal imaging goggles, one sniffer dog, then all the wheels fall off this stealth op. So you need a distraction.”

Steve has been doing his God-damnedest to not think too hard about any of that.

If—if stealth fails, if he’s gotta, he can always fight his way through the factory, but—but that’s gonna be a fuckin’ shitshow. There’s at least a couple STRIKE teams on site, according to Hill’s intel. If he’s gotta throat-punch his way past all twenty fellas, plus HammerTech’s guards—it’s a gamble.

“So what’s your play?” Steve asks.

Sam tells him the play. Sam keeps telling him as Steve starts shaking his head, as Steve gets up and paces around the room like a caged animal, as—

“Jesus _Christ_ , Sam,” Steve grinds out, staring at the far wall. “I can’t ask you to do that. I can’t ask— _God Almighty_. I can’t ask them to take that kind of risk.”

“You didn’t ask,” Sam replies, quiet and level and granite-firm. “This is Hydra. This is legitimate Nazi bullshit, and this time around they got mind-control guns. You think we’re gonna be any safer, sitting this fight out?”

“I think they’re civilians.”

“You gotta say that like it’s a dirty word?” Sam quirks his eyebrows. “Remind me who the French Resistance was, again? We’re ready for this.”

“This isn’t gonna be a war,” Steve says, hands openings and closing into fists. “Hydra aren’t soldiers. They’re fanatics. They won’t give a single God damn if they gotta kill a couple thousand civilians to get the job done.”

“The United States government has _never_ given a God damn about the killing of Black civilians,” Sam answers. “But that’s besides the point. Hydra are big picture psychopaths—they want the world. They start with the war crimes this early in the game, the world is gonna take a whole lotta notice. And the world will be watching tomorrow—we’ve got confirmation, every major news network, global.”

Outside the HammerTech office in Manhattan, the streets are clear. BAST have scattered, dropped below the radar and gone dark. Underground dark. Mushrooms, spreading tendrils under the soil kinda dark. And tomorrow, at oh-seven-hundred hours, they’re gonna surface in Detroit.

“It’s too dangerous, Sam,” Steve says, rubbing at his mouth, at his jaw, and—

“They know the risks,” Sam replies, the kinda rock steady you could build a temple on. “Every single one. They’re volunteers. No one is looking to be a martyr, Steve; we’re not a shield. Think of us like a fireworks display—and while Hydra’s shitheads are staring at all the lights, you’re gonna walk right past and quietly ruin their whole entire day.”

“And what happens if Hydra’s shitheads bite?”

“Then the whole damn world sees what Hydra’s endgame looks like,” Sam says. “And we’re gonna be glad we’ve got air support.”

Holy Mary, Mother of God. Okay— _shit_. Okay.

Just— _God Almighty, give me strength_. Enough to get everybody out the other side of this in one piece.

*******

The next time Steve hauls himself back up from the riptide pull of his sorcery, the vast shifting-constant ebb and flow of Creation being sung into being, his spine is one long lash-stroke of Goddamn fire from lying on the Goddamn floor and his hands are numb where they’re wrapped around the spell-anchor knife—done, finished. Three down, one more to go.

He opens his eyes, blinks until they focus, turns his head a notch towards the soft click of metal against metal and—and sees the Soldier sitting maybe not-quite a yard away and staring at him.

Bucky’s cross-legged on the floor, a Glock neatly laid out in pieces on the carpet in front of his feet, cleaning cloth in his right hand.

His hair is shower-wet, tendrils glued to the skin of his throat and darkening the shoulders of his T-shirt. He looks good—clear-eyed and freshly scrubbed. Hands are steady, sticky with gun oil at the tips of his fingers.

There’s a whetstone and a half-dozen knives next to his left hip—some are Steve’s, one is Clint’s, which means—means those two must have come from Natasha.

She’s given him two of her own weapons. It’s the professional murderer pack-bonding thing again, trust spoken in the language of folded steel and ceramic alloy.

“Buck,” Steve slurs, heaving himself over to lie on his side.

Bucky drops the cleaning cloth. Stares at Steve’s right ear, jaw working, silent, for one heartbeat, two, and then—

“You need field support,” he says, toneless, and then—another heartbeat pause, and the fingers of his metal hand curl into a fist, and—“I’m going in as second man on the factory infiltration.”

“What?” Steve says, like the Goddamn intellectual giant that he is, and then—“No. Buck, no, it’s—if Hydra get at you, say those magic words, our pooch is screwed.”

“So make me deaf again.”

“You’re gonna run a whole op, deaf as a post? How the Hell does that work?”

“I’ve done it before,” Bucky answers, and the plates of his fuck-off metal arm shift, ripple, realign themselves like the hairs down a cat’s spine. “Explosion blew my eardrums out.” He shifts his weight, spine and pelvis and the coiled muscle of his thighs, breathes out hard and then—

“I’ve completed missions, outta my head with poison. Without the use of either Goddamn arm. With a chunk of fuckin’ shrapnel hangin’ out of my Goddamn spleen. Stark fuckin’ naked, in the middle of a Siberian winter.” He stops, swallows hard, starts again: “You can make me deaf, or—”

He picks up one Natasha’s knives, stiletto blade fine as a knitting needle at the tip, and gestures broadly at the side of his head, at his _ear_ —“I can do it the other way—”

“Jesus Christ, _no_ ,” Steve yelps, whole-body spasming his way up to sitting and slapping at the stiletto like it’s on fucking fire. The knife hits the carpet, skitters under the coffee table and—

—and that was Buck’s metal hand.

Mother of _God_ , but that stings.

Silence again, stretching out, fraught and tight as steel wire strained to snapping.

Steve shoves the fingers of his right hand into his armpit and clamps down against the raw sunburn hum of nerve endings. Bucky watches the knife roll to a stop and then—and then _he_ stops, staring fixed, jaw working again and his brow slowly going down like thunderheads mounding up on the horizon and then—

“Am I a Kalashnikov you’re gonna rack away when you’re not using?” Bucky asks, bitter curl to his upper lip, and—

“No,” Steve answers, immediate, lurch of horror like a fist to the gut, and—

“Gonna put me in cryo, next?”

“Jesus, _no_ —”

“Because I ain’t Hydra’s weapon anymore. I’m _yours_ ,” and his eyes snaps to Steve’s, cold and pale as pack ice. “And per _your_ orders, I get to choose my missions. So I’m coming with.”

He presses his index finger to the ball of his knee at the end, a punctuation mark. “You need field support. My choice.”

There’s—silence for a long moment, both of ‘em staring at—eye contact, Jesus, Buck’s making eye contact, solid as the foundations of the Earth, and he looks—raw. Flayed. Like it’s taken all he’s got to get himself this far, and he’s half expecting Steve to smack him upside the head for insubordination and put him back in that fuckin’ electric chair.

“You picked a Hell of a time to remember how free will works,” Steve says, and then Bucky’s jaw twitches again and he blinks, hard, shudders, looks away, down at the gun components spread out in front of him.

“Okay,” Steve says. “Okay, Buck. You want in, I’ll deal you in,” and Bucky looks up again, meets Steve’s gaze again for a good couple seconds, nods.

*******

At a quarter to Goddamn midnight, Steve finishes making the fourth spell-anchor. Four throwing knives, blued steel heavy with spell after spell, packed in there dense enough you can feel a subtle staticky heat coming off the metal from a good inch away.

Four blades. Four anchors. One for each of the outer walls of the HammerTech complex—so he can hold the whole sprawling factory inside his Goddamn brain, his will, his awareness.

And hex every fucking one of their monstrous weapons.

And then at one in the Goddamn morning, Wednesday the 29th of January, a Stark Industries helicopter touches down on the helipad of the Ocean Casino Resort.

A leggy redheaded dame unfolds, Prada stiletto heels first, and prowls across the helipad to the elevator, one hand protecting her sleek chignon from the chopper blades’ downdraft, gaze glued to her cell phone screen and a couple suited security fellas trailing after.

She passes close enough to catch the scent of her subtly floral perfume.

The real Pepper Potts wears woodsy kinda scents, darker and fuller, perfumes that complement the smell of jet fuel or engine grease or electrical fire, depending on the kinda day Tony’s having in the workshop. This dame is a pretty good body double: hair is the right shade of strawberry bronze, suit is cut sharp enough to shave with, and she’s done some sorcery with a contour palette to reshape her nose, sharpen her cheekbones—but the perfume is wrong.

The real Pepper Potts quietly flew out to London on Tuesday morning. Tony gambles with his own life like he found it in the bottom of a dollar store bargain bin, but he’d shift the Earth on its axis to keep Pepper safe. If this mission fails—if _they_ fail—she’s gonna be outside of the initial impact zone.

The elevator doors slide closed. The helicopter rotors keep churning, slicing the night air into ribbons.

Steve counts slowly to five, breathes out, and then he squeezes down at Buck’s wrist, at Sam’s wrist—he’s got ‘em both under his veil, holding hands like kindergarteners on their first museum field trip—and they start forward.

When Sam hauls the chopper door closed behind them, the two fellas in the cockpit jump like scalded cats and one of ‘em yelps loud enough to hear over the roar of the blades overhead.

“Let’s go,” Steve yells to heard, and—

“Invisible! Right,” says—it’s Happy Hogan, Tony’s security fella, twisted around to stare wildly into the back, his gaze going straight through them.

“Invisible people. Christ, I thought he was screwing with me.” He reaches over with a wavering hand, socks the pilot in the shoulder, and—

And thirty seconds later they’re in the air, the lights of Atlantic City dwindling down to pinpricks beneath them.

*******

And then—

Oh-six-hundred, Wednesday the 29th of January, sunrise only just a low purple streak of paint across the Eastern horizon and Detroit sprawled out below, rumpled and concrete and black and—

“Ready,” Sam says, voice doubled over the comms and coming from behind as he steps up, stands in the door frame with a hand up overhead, hanging on.

He’s got his wing pack strapped on, locked and loaded, over jeans, a long-sleeved shirt. Shit-kicking boots. SHIELD-issue ICER guns holstered under each arm. Goggles, down and over his eyes. Ready.

“Keep moving,” Steve tells him, shouting to be heard past the howl of chopper blades, engines, wind. “Don’t get killed.”

“Outta the three of us,” Sam replies, mouth quirked. “Think I got the best track record on not getting killed.” And then he turns, tips a lazy two-fingered salute back—at Steve, at Bucky, at the guys in the cockpit—and lets himself fall backwards from the helicopter.

He’s—freefall, for one heartbeat, two, and Steve’s heart lurches up to the back of his throat, choking, and then—and then the spark of engines firing, thrusters flaring, and he’s flying, metal wings unfurled, soaring easy as thought over the city.

Somewhere down there in the dark, BAST protesters will be collecting in cells in the streets around HammerTech’s factory—linking arms, coordinating movement and timing. Preparing to put down roots; preparing in body, in mind, in soul, for what might just end up being a Goddamn pitched battle in a couple hours time.

Risking everything to bring down Hydra, expose ‘em to the cold light of day.

Nadya is down there. Trip, and Amber. Sam, wings and all like a mechanised guardian angel, big and loud and flashing light and holding the attention of the world’s press, of the whole damn world.

Holding Hydra to account.

And it all falls apart if Steve doesn’t get the job done inside.

No pressure or nothin’.

War on three fronts—Detroit, HammerTech.

In Washington D.C., Natasha and Hill hitting the Triskelion, data-dumping all the dirty laundry.

And in New York City, Hawkeye and Stark are moving to contain Hammer’s truckload of brain-washing tech before Hydra has a chance to use ‘em.

A tug at Steve’s shoulder and he twists, shifting his weight to stay balanced on the landing skid—it’s Bucky, yanking at the straps of Steve’s chute. Checking the fit.

His hands are steady, hair a wild tangle around his face from the wind, the turbulence. Geared up in his own parachute pack and his own pair of shit-kicking boots, about seven fuckin’ guns, and Clint’s spare SHIELD-issue tac suit, left sleeve cut off.

“You okay?” Bucky asks, quiet enough past the thunder of the helicopter that Steve’s gotta read his lips. He’s locked his gaze to Steve’s left ear—gotta look up to do it, with Steve in his Cap shape.

And Steve—goes to lie, the easy _I’m okay_ caught at his lips and then—and then he stops and—

He’s _okay_.

He’s— _Christ_ , Steve is so deeply fucked in the head.

This is the most _okay_ he’s been in Goddamn years.

He’s got Sam, and Natasha and Tony and Clint, and they all know the truth about him and they’ve all still got his back. He’s got Bucky, alive, and even more deeply fucked in the head than Steve and yet Steve is _grateful_ , sick piece of shit that he is, that Bucky survived seventy fucking years of torture to make it here.

He’s got an enemy with names and faces, a source for all of this fear and anger and anguish, instead of—of—he’s got people he can punch, not—not just vast black Goddamn holes inside his own head.

Steve reaches up with his spare hand. Touches his dog tags where they rest against Bucky’s sternum, looped around his neck, Steve’s best _hear-no-evil_ silencing veil anchored inside.

He looks Buck in the eye and forces a smile, something from his Captain America playbook, grim but purposeful.

“ _Cap?_ ” comes over the comms, and Steve looks away, looks back at—Hogan is stood up in the cockpit, hanging onto the seats to brace himself. He nods, mouth set in a flat line. “ _Thirty seconds to drop._ ”

Steve nods back. Reaches over his shoulder to feel the rim of his shield, vibranium cold in the winter air, mounted on his back behind the chute pack.

Shield. Dermal anchors. Two knives, sheathed in his boot and at his lower back, plus another four in the pocket of his tac rig—spell anchors.

Two hands, two skin suits to swap between, and one deeply fucked up caramel centre.

“Ready?” Steve asks Buck, and Bucky nods, once, crisp, his eyes on the target—down, ahead; the city, the factory—

“Here goes nothin’,” Steve says, and lets himself fall into the night.


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Doctor Strange voice* We're in the endgame, now.
> 
> Warning for above-canon-typical violence and gore. Some Nazis have a very bad day, and so, for that matter, does Steve.

They land on the factory roof, south end of the complex—veiled, hidden.

Take a hot second to unclip their parachutes, reef all the soft fabric in and bundle it down small, and then Buck casually hangs his whole upper body from the edge of the roof and pries open a window lock with the flat of a knife and—

And Steve hangs onto Bucky by the knees—Buck didn’t ask for help but he’s top-heavy, most of the metal and plating in his upper body, and Steve didn’t save his dumb ass from Hydra only to have Buck turn around and kill himself fallin’ off a fuckin’ roof—and looks around, looks out into the dark.

BAST are already here, a couple hundred-odd folks starting to circle up around the whole complex, down the street and around the corner and across the very back of the staff car park and—and there’s a bus pulling up, a couple cars behind it. More people, more protesters.

As long as the blockade holds, Hydra can’t move any more of their weapons outta this factory. BAST, these people—they’re gambling life and limb and their Goddamn sanity here. Steve’s gotta make damn sure the gamble pays off.

There’s a soft click and then Bucky breathes out, steady and controlled, reaches back and sheathes the knife again in the tac rig strapped over his tatty blue jeans, and then there’s the rattling scrape of a window sliding open, slow and easy. There’s—

_Light_ , pink, arching across the sky and— _fuck, shit_.

Mother of Christ, that’s—coming from over—there’s a half-dozen BAST personnel, across the carpark, working around a trailer full of—grey boxes, lighting arrays, sending up a streamer of hot pink light into the sky—

—and then the pink snaps off and there’s green light, the same lurid poison-green as Loki’s magic spill-off, and then the beam of light starts to move, rolling, bright green circle ducking and weaving against the charcoal-grey cloud cover overhead.

“Holy shit,” Steve breathes—it’s a light show. It’s an honest-to-Christ light show, and he’d figured Sam was maybe exaggerating some when he said _think of us like a fireworks display_ but apparently the fuck not.

And—movement, Buck leaning further forward into Goddamn thin air and then slithering in through the open window, boneless and liquid as a cat, and Steve takes a last look around—at the protesters, the blockade, the line of cars and bikes and humans, rumble of voices calling out, questions and instructions and song.

He closes his eyes, breathes out. Breathes in.

“ _Ave Maria_ ,” Steve prays. “ _Gratia plena, Dominus tecum_.”

And then he breathes out again, latches onto the edge of the roof, and swings himself over into the void.

Into the office—second floor of the complex, up above one of the factory floors. The grey pre-dawn light oozing in from outside turns the industrial beige of the walls to a corpse-colour of puce; there’s a couple desks and computers set up, filing cabinets. An artificial plant on one of the desks. Some kid’s art tacked up to a notice board, alongside memos and spreadsheets, HammerTech letterhead.

Buck is standing in the middle of the room, head cocked, listening. “Four outside,” he murmurs, fingers of his metal hand slowly furling open and closed.

It was a pain in Steve’s Goddamn ass, figuring out how to split the veil down the middle, one spell spread across two moving objects. They can see each other, hear each other, interact, but they don’t gotta—gotta do this whole factory job holding hands like grade school kids on their first field trip to the zoo.

Took some experimenting but he figured it out. One spell, two anchors, one of ‘em on Steve and one on Bucky.

It ain’t foolproof—Lord knows He’s always out there, designing better fools—but it’s the best he could come out with on short fuckin’ notice.

“Copy that,” Steve replies, and—he nods at the office door, the way outta here onto—it feeds onto the catwalk, takes you across the factory floor. Bucky mutely gives a fraction of a nod in reply and prowls over there, one hand resting on the P30 holstered at his thigh, slow and silent as night falling.

Steve shrugs off his chute pack and shoves the bundled up fabric into one of the desk chairs. Reclaims his shield and digs in the pocket of his tac rig for—the first throwing blade.

First anchor. Southernmost edge of his grid.

He punches it into the wall, maybe a handspan down from the windowsill, steel sliding through drywall up to the hilt. Like he’s planting a flag in contested territory.

Here. It started here; it ends here.

Turn around and—Buck is nudging the office door open, slow and easy, gentle pressure with the fingertips of his metal hand. Like it maybe got caught in a breeze, veiled and hidden and nothing to see here, asshole, and—

—metal grid of the catwalk, and the sprawl of the factory floor beyond and—

And four guards. All clustered up this end of the catwalk, close enough to swap gossip and spin shit.

There’s no way to sneak around ‘em—the catwalk is gonna vibrate like a struck bell anytime someone so much as shifts his weight out there. Means Steve and Buck have gotta go through ‘em.

Fuck. So much for stealth.

Steve studies the four guards—generic black tac suits, helmets, rifles. No heat vision rig, thank Christ. One of ‘em has got his eyes on the job, scanning over the factory floor below; the other three are staring out the windows at—at BAST’s lighting arrays, carving open the dark in shades of electric blue and poison gold and hot pink.

Distracted. Which means—

“We hit ‘em fast, hard, silent,” Steve says, easing his shield down to lean it against the wall and cracking his knuckles. They’re veiled but he still pitches his voice low, because some things are just wired in like that. “Can’t let ‘em raise the alarm.”

The look Buck gives him in reply is—he’s wild around the eyes for half a heartbeat, incredulity and then—and then his eyes narrow and his jaw works like Steve’s the stupidest son of a bitch in Creation—and who knows, it may be true—

—and then he mutely turns, pulls a throwing blade from his tac jacket, and throws it, fluid and smooth as silk on a shoe shine and—

—and the blade punches into the watchful guy’s fucking eye socket, square and clean, and he’s sagging straight down like his every bone just turned to liquid and Buck is there, catching him by the front of the tac suit before he can hit the catwalk and—

—and Bucky’s veil is dissolving, their veil is dissolving, shards of gold light falling away, leaving Buck exposed, and— _Christ_.

Get your shit together, Rogers.

Steve heaves himself forward, leaving streamers of dissolving spell behind him—the other three guards are starting to respond, human-slow, turning towards movement in the same automatic way that plants turn to face the sun, and—

Steve can see the exact Goddamn instant they realise they’re in the shit, the exact instant they see Buck and blood and their hindbrains kick over and fingers shift to rifle triggers and mouths start to fall open and—

—and Steve hits ‘em, two of ‘em, big hamburger hands slamming palm first over their mouths, teeth, jaws, and squeezing, hauling—

Slams their heads together and hears the muted _crack_ of helmet polymer giving way and—

—and he’s digging in with his fingertips where jaw meets neck, dragging both mooks back and back, into the office, off the catwalk and outta sight lines and—

And then he hammers their heads together a couple more times, harder.

Stops for a second and—and they’re limp, heavy as sacks of potatoes, wet of blood and brain fluid on his hands and the acid-sharp stink of piss in the air.

He breathes out. Lowers them both to the cheap carpet, slow and careful and silent, distantly aware of the static-squirmy feel of the last threads of veil giving up the ghost, last traces of spell molting away like the skin of a sick snake.

_Jesus wept_ —Steve swallows past the ugly flood of spit at the back of his mouth, looks up.

Buck is hauling another of ‘em into the office, metal arm clamped vice-tight around his neck and limbs dragging limp as cooked spaghetti.

The fella with four inches of powdered steel stuck through his right Goddamn eye socket is still out on the catwalk, remaining eye staring soulless and fixed up at the roof—Steve slips out past Buck, grabs the guard under his shoulders, drags him back into cover.

Four bodies, one neat pile, twelve seconds flat.

Steve breathes, cocks his head, listens.

There’s the tidal surge of voices, heartbeats, feet on concrete from outside, BAST protesters gathering—God, there’s gotta be at least three hundred of ‘em by now, sounds like, and more arriving all the time—purr of car engines pulling up and—is that another bus?

But past that, from inside the factory itself, he can’t… No alarms going off. No voices, raised and shouting. No footsteps coming their way.

They’re clean. No one knows they’re here. No one living, anyway.

Scoops up his shield and fishes in the pocket of his consignment store cargo pants, hauls out the linked chain of Atlantic City key rings. Three of ‘em. Because there was no Goddamn time to make more anchors, more veils, because they had to meet the chopper, and the timeline was already too fucking tight—

Hydra has already got two trucks full of operatives and brain-fuck weapons out in the world. Which forces Steve’s hand, forces the timing forward—they’ve gotta respond, today, now. Neutralise the threat before the threat starts neutralising people, in fuckin’ batches of a dozen or a hundred at a time, in the middle of Goddamn New York.

So, he and Buck have got all of three linked veil spells to work with here. And they’ve just burned one of ‘em.

Number two is—central link in the chain and—and Steve can feel the static cling of the magic locked in the metal, can feel the hairs-on-end brush of the veil settling over his skin as he pulls the spell out and through, into the world.

Steve opens his eyes. Finds Buck waiting at the office door, just outta sight lines from the rest of the factory. Poised, still, listening, watching. Metal shoulder canted forward, because he leads with the arm into firefights, like a shield. That look on his face is—it’s the same kinda look he’d wear on the front, 1944, staring through the scope of his Johnson rifle.

“Let’s go,” Steve says, and Buck nods and moves out.

*******

Out and along the catwalk, across and above the factory floor—and they’re moving slow and easy, because this thing is metal, and they’re veiled but that’s only gonna muffle them, their footfalls, not the quiver and the ring of the steel out and away from their feet, so—so _slow_.

It feels unnatural—they’re right the Hell out in the open, line of sight to God and everybody—and the veil is solid as granite, and the closest guards are—gotta be over in the next area; Steve can hear heartbeats and respiration, the rumble of voices and scrape of boots on concrete, but it’s distant, muffled.

Over machines and conveyor belts and—and to the far end, stairs flowing down to the floor below, and down, down, Steve in the lead with his shield up and Buck at his shoulder, one of Natasha’s slender throwing blades ready between the fingers of his human hand and—

“ _Cap_ ,” comes over the comms, and Steve jolts so bad he almost misses a step.

It’s been radio silent for most of an hour and—

And nobody oughta need to use the general comms channel. Not unless the shit has hit the fan. Which means—

“ _Cap_ ,” comes again—it’s Stark, it’s Tony, sounding—Christ, Steve hasn’t heard him sounding like this since the Battle of New York. Since watching Coulson’s quinjet go down over Lexington Ave.

“Stark,” Steve says, spilling down the last couple stairs to get his feet on solid ground. “I copy.”

“ _It’s Hydra_ ,” Tony says, flat and furious. “ _They’re in my suit systems_.”

Jesus fucking Almighty—Steve’s blood pulses to ice water in his chest. They—Hydra are— _Christ_.

This is FUBAR. Hydra with control of Tony’s suit tech is endgame, end of the _fuckin’ world_ scenario shit.

“ _I’ve got JARVIS keeping the suits grounded_ ,” Tony is saying, and Steve’s heart lurches in his chest like he’s just yanked on a parachute release. “ _Keeping the weapon systems offline. I’m not—Hydra doesn’t get to play with my toys—but I’m out. I can’t_ —”

He’s tripping over words, sentences broken down joint by joint.

Tony—he’s still sick. Still recovering, post-op. But he’s got JARVIS, got his suit systems, and he can remote pilot from a wheelchair or a bed if he’s gotta, only—

“ _It’s all I can do to keep them from stealing my suits,_ ” Tony grits out. “ _I can’t—I can’t fly. Can’t help. I’m sorry_.”

In—Steve closes his eyes for a half-second and consults the Goddamn mission timeline tattooed in the inside of his brain pan. In about an hour, those HammerTech trucks are gonna spill out of the George Washington tunnel and start vomiting out Hydra agents and brainwashing tech in the middle of Goddamn Manhattan.

Their target was the BAST action at HammerTech, and—and BAST aren’t there anymore. Slipped away in the night—they’re maintaining a presence, a front, but it’s tiny now, a couple dozen folks who are slipping away like water through cracks in stone with the dawn.

Still leaves a whole lotta brain-fuck guns and Hydra agents at loose ends on Manhattan Island. Hydra agents who’re gonna have no place to go and nothing to lose, the second Natasha and Hill release SHIELD’s files, so—

So they _have_ to be neutralised before that happens. Which was Tony’s job, Tony and Clint, only—

Steve fades back against the wall, hand to his comms earpiece like he’s gonna get better news if he listens careful enough. “How’d they get in?”

Tony’s system—he wasn’t fucking around when he set up his security protocols. For Hydra to have got inside the suit systems—they need to have had an agent physically somewhere—close, kissing close, maybe inside Stark Tower itself.

And if the Tower was breached then—

“ _Working on finding that out_ ,” Tony replies, and—

“Are you okay?” Steve asks—Mother of Christ, if Hydra have someone inside Stark Tower, then—“Are you safe?”

“ _Listen,_ safe _is not so much a binary as a sliding scale_ ,” Tony says—which is… _no kind of fucking answer_ , and then—“ _The job. Big picture, Cap_.”

Right—okay—“Barton, what’s your game plan?”

Silence on the comms for a few seconds, and then Clint says: “ _Okay, so the plan was: Iron Man blows up bad guys, Hawkeye tidies up around the edges, maybe offers some moral support. I’m, uh, I’m still figuring out Plan B_.”

Fuck.

Jesus Christ on a cracker, there’s gonna be—what, worst case scenario, maybe twenty guys in those trucks? Clint is good—he’s damn good, like a couple arrows fired per second kinda good, but—but there’s twenty of them. Each of ‘em firing bullets at somethin’ like _15 rounds_ per second.

That’s—that’s long fucking odds.

This is—they need _soldiers_. Need agents, need allies, boots on the ground—someone, anyone, and they’re already stretched to their limits, six fuckin’ lunatics fighting the entire machine of the US Government, and they—wait—

“Tony,” Steve blurts, “I need—can you make a call and patch it through to my comms?”

“ _Phone operator? Little below my pay grade—what do you need_?”

Steve closes his eyes again, trawls through the depths of his rat-trap eidetic memory, rattles off a string of numbers, and then—

Ringtone, purring in his ear, once, twice, three times—

Click of the line opening and—“ _This is Murdock_.”

*******

The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen—besides having Goddamn _amateur hour_ operational security, for Christ’s sake. Steve _didn’t need to know your fuckin’ surname, Matthew_ —has a couple strong opinions about Hydra moving agents and experimental brainwashing tech through the middle of his Goddamn neighbourhood.

Which takes care of New York. Matt, Clint, with Tony coordinating this shit show from the Tower—it’s gotta be enough. This is the only play they can make.

Steve drops his hand from his earpiece and breathes out, long and slow. Looks up from the cement floor. Bucky is pacing like a tiger held in captivity for too long, up and down the factory floor, turning the knife in his meat hand, the metal one resting on the P30 where it’s holstered at his thigh. Watchful, listening, jaw tight.

“Buck,” Steve calls, and Bucky turns, spillover from the light show outside painting blue across his forehead and cheekbones, the gleam of Steve’s dog tags on his chest.

There’s a soundproof bubble spell anchored in those tags, ready to deploy the second any Hydra cocksucker wants to start singin' in Russian. It’s not a perfect solution—Steve is shit outta perfect solutions for fuckin’ anything—but it’s better’n having Buck run the whole mission stone deaf.

“Movin’ out?” Buck asks, and Steve nods, his head cocked to the left, to the east. Next anchor drop point.

Easternmost point on the big fuckin’ grid is an employee locker room. Steve pulls an anchor blade from his tac rig, mindlessly turning the knife from a forehand to a backhand hold as he looks around the room, looks for—and for a couple seconds he figures he’ll just stab the blade into one of the bench seats but then—

But then that leaves a whole wall of lockers outside of the spell grid.

And there’s a some kinda percentage chance that there are Hydra guns or chips or components in those lockers, which means they’ve all gotta fry.

Steve heads over, picks out the locker dead-centre of the wall. Sets his shield down on the bench and then slides the tip of the knife into the crack of the door, next to the lock, and leans in.

Slow, careful, because he doesn’t want to make a whole lotta noise but he needs _open_ , needs inside, needs to catch every locker and all the shit inside ‘em in his spell grid and—

The lock pops.

It’s—it ain’t loud but—but metal carries vibration, carries sound, like slapping the surface of a kettle drum, and the crunch and squeal of metal shearing hums through the locker wall, the surrounding metal—

Way the fuck outside of the edges of Steve’s veil.

_God fuckin’ damn it._

Steve freezes for a full heartbeat, eyes closed, _listening_. Listening to the shudder of molecules—through metal into the air, into the world, and it bounces around the locker room and out, out into the factory and—

Look, it wasn’t that Goddamn loud. No guards stationed nearby. Surely to Christ—

“ _What the shit was that_?” From the distance—sounds like it’s way the Hell across the factory floor—and then comes the soft scrape of boots over concrete.

Fuck’s sake.

Steve looks around—Buck is wild-eyed in the doorway, plates of his metal arm shifting like the bristle of hair down a dog’s spine, staring out into the half-lit gloom of the factory.

Can hear the percussion of footsteps, booted feet on concrete, the creak and scrape of body armour. Heartbeats. Guards. Coming this way.

No putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

“Okay,” Steve grits out, and then he turns back to—to the row of steel doors, the open locker in the centre. Pair of shoes and a box of protein powder sachets—Steve shoves all the shit outta the way, lines up the tip of the knife with the rear wall of the locker.

Breathes in and breathes out and shoves, hard, folded steel cutting through the cheap green sheet metal and into the plasterboard of the wall beyond.

Hammer, nail.

Two anchors placed.

And—he turns and the doorway is empty, empty as the coffin buried under Bucky’s Brooklyn grave site, and Steve freezes up for a couple seconds, dumb animal panic yawing up from his hindbrain because _where’s Buck, oh God_ —

And then there’s the muted sound of bones breaking, and a choked-off scream, and Steve’s veil starts dissolving like cotton candy in the rain.

“Mother of Christ,” Steve spits, snatching up his shield and putting his head down and running.

Out of the locker room and—

The factory is half-lit now, grey early smear of sunlight and erratic splashes of gold and pink and green and blue and white spearing in through the narrow windows overhead. Means Steve can’t—can’t fuckin’ say what he’s seein’, for that first second or so, his brain snatching at details and painting ‘em dense and bold as oils on canvas—

—black tac gear and the gleam of a helmet. A gloved hand on a stun baton. Bared teeth. Boots, scraping across concrete.

It’s all explosive movement and heartbeats, pounding, roaring, and someone is hollering but Steve can’t pull words, meaning, outta the sound. It’s a Jackson Pollock, working in the medium of close combat.

And then Steve catches the flash of blue light offa Bucky’s weapon arm, and the clusterfuck resolves into—men, arms, booted feet, rifles—

There’s five of ‘em—six.

Six squid fucks in ink-black tac gear, one of ‘em already on the ground and writhing. About halfway across the factory floor, in the no-man’s land between a couple lengths of conveyor belt. And Bucky’s in the middle of their scattered formation, human fingers snarled into the fabric of one mook’s tac jacket and hauling, reefing him in and off-balance and—

And the fella behind Buck is bringing up his sidearm, clean professional two-handed stance, levelling the gun at Bucky’s back and—

And Steve plants himself, winds back like a piston retracting, uncoils and throws his shield with every Goddamn thing he’s got and—

—and the noise he’s making is—if he were in a wolf body it’d be a snarl, but a human chest and larynx ain’t the right shape and it sounds like he’s ripping his oesophagus open from the inside because he’s _too slow_ , he’s too slow and he’s more’n human fast but he ain’t faster than nerves firing, from brain to spine to arm to hand, the minute muscular twitch of a trigger finger pulling—

The squid fires and Bucky is turning, turning into it and hauling the mook he’s got by the shirt-front around with him, thoughtless fluid muscle memory like he’s dancing and—

—and holding the guy in place, metal arm curled around his throat, meat shield catching the rounds. One bullet, two—

_Craang_ of Steve’s shield hammering into the back of the shooter’s head, and he’s dropping, sprawling like a burlap sack of off-cuts, bones and knuckles, the gun falling outta his hand. The shield shoots off across the room and a couple of the squids are turning Steve’s way, recognising the second threat—

“Put them _down_ ,” one of the guards roars, and Steve bares his teeth and runs at them, seeing the staring black eye of a gun barrel coming up to meet his gaze and—

Steve fakes left—weaves to the right and jumps, booted foot coming down on the edge of the conveyor belt and fuckin’ up and over and—

—and he ploughs boot-first into a squid’s midsection, and Kevlar is gonna protect you against small arms fire but it ain’t gonna do shit about 230 pounds of wrecking ball colliding with your fuckin’ sternum and—

And down, sprawling, and Steve rolls and slaps the concrete and digs in with his fingertips and pushes up—get up, _keep moving_ —

—and the crack of a bullet taking a chunk outta the floor about where his Goddamn head was half a second ago and—

Steve turns, takes it all on board in diamond-bright flashes: the shooter, taking aim at Steve’s centre mass. Candy-pink light striped across the brutal boxy factory machines, the steel and concrete. Bucky, arching back up to his feet in one heave and pulling a knife from his tac jacket, his face as cold and expressionless as Hydra’s Goddamn muzzle.

_Keep moving, shithead_ —

Quick half-turn—make yourself a narrower target and—and then Steve folds and ducks and rolls, as tight as he can get in this big dumb shape and Christ this is easier when he’s five-foot-squat and made outta gristle and spite—

—throws himself to the right like he’s gonna duck behind the conveyor belt and at the edge of his gaze he can see the Hydra fuck staying on him, drawing a bead—

Keepin’ eyes on Steve. Which means he ain’t lookin’ behind, which means—

There’s a wet noise like someone stepped on an overripe fruit, and then a high gurgling whine.

There’s a half-inch of red-slick steel poking outta the guard’s neck, just above his Adam’s apple. Below the lip of the helmet, above the collar of his body armour, threading the needle from behind neat as you like and—

Buck tears the knife free of the goon’s neck—Steve hears the wet scrape of a metal edge brushing over bone and—and the guy’s dropping his gun and dropping to his knees, fumbling hands going to the hole in his neck, to the froth of air and blood foaming out, and through the faceplate of the helmet Steve can see wide open eyes and his gaping mouth, moving wordlessly and—

And down, facedown on the cement, writhing and gasping slowly, dumb animal biology grasping after those last seconds of life.

Christ on a fucking bike, what a shit show.

Steve tears his gaze away—focus up, _come on_ —looks up and looks around, lightning fast study of—six squids, all of ‘em down, various flavours of out cold or dying or dead.

They did _not_ go down quietly—the whole Goddamn factory has gotta know they’re here by now.

Buck is wiping clean the blade of his knife on his jeans and watching the Hydra mook die slow like he’s watching paint dry. There’s a dew of sweat at his hairline and—and he came up offa the floor to stab that poor dumb fuck, which means someone put him _down_ there, which means—“You okay?”

Buck doesn’t answer, brow knotting down like storm clouds on the distant horizon, gaze still trained on the dying man, and Steve—

“Buck. Soldier. You okay, you wounded?” he’s asking, striding over to where Bucky’s standing and—and he’s digging in his pocket as he goes, hauling out the keychain of veils.

Two down, already. Burning through ‘em too damn quick, and they’ve only planted two of the Goddamn anchors, and now every motherfucker and his dog knows they’re here—

“Got shot,” Bucky says, bland as porridge, and he’s looking over the other Hydra goons now, checking status, like he ain’t just said—

—and Steve can feel the breath seeping outta his Goddamn lungs like someone is slowly pushing a fist up and through his diaphragm, and—

“Armour caught it. I’m not compromised. We standin’ around out in the open like assholes right now?”

_Mother fuckin’ Mary, full of_ —Steve fumbles the key chains with shaking hands, closes his eyes and indulges in the mad luxury of breathing for half a second— _armour caught it._

Merciful _Christ._

And then he draws the veil spell out and drops it, draped over his skin and hair and he can see Buck shimmer for a heartbeat, like the haze off hot tarmac in the middle of summer, as his twin veil activates and covers him.

Last veil spell deployed. Gotta make it fucking count.

Steve can see the bullet scar in the front of Bucky’s armoured tac jacket. Right over the solar plexus, right where—it’d break ribs, a shot like that. Close range. Glance off the spine and puncture a lung. Tear the root of the aorta away from the heart so you bleed out on the inside, ten seconds flat.

The armour caught it. It’s still gotta hurt like Hell, is gonna bruise up fierce, but Buck’s got some kinda healing factor. He’s saying he’s not compromised, and Steve’s gotta believe him.

Breathe out, long and slow and controlled.

“Buck,” Steve says, and he’s using his Cap voice so Bucky shifts, straightening his stance like a five-star general just rolled into the hospitality tent. “I need you—you gotta stay close, pal. If one of those guys knew your words, I’da been too far out to get to you before they completed the trigger.”

Because that’s the one saving grace they got, this whole Goddamn mess with magic words in Buck’s head—it takes all ten of ‘em, or the trigger don’t work. Gives Steve _time_ to reef out the anchored silencing veil, switch Bucky’s ears off.

Which only Goddamn works if Steve can _reach him_.

Bucky looks—jaw working, tight around the eyes. Like a sidewalk in Brooklyn, subtle tremors as the subway passes underneath—whole lotta movement and violence happening a long way under the surface. And then—

“ _Tak tochno_ ,” he rasps, and—fuckin’ excellent, Russian again, only—only then he shifts again, uncoiling, looking around the factory floor, entry points, exits.

“Awful fuckin’ quiet out here.”

He’s not wrong.

Right now, they oughta be neck-deep in Hydra cocksuckers. There’s no Goddamn way the other guards, other STRIKE team on site, didn’t hear that performance art clusterfuck unfolding, gunshots and screaming and all—but no one’s come calling. Which—which could mean a couple things.

Either that’s all of ‘em, down and done, and there’s a whole spare STRIKE team missing outta their numbers, outta their plan, off Christ only knows where.

Or—or it means the second STRIKE team is holding position where they are in the factory because it’s a better site for an ambush.

What a cheery fucking thought. Steve looks over and meets Buck’s gaze; reads the narrowing of his eyes and the pinched line of his mouth—the Soldier’s tactical analysis is about as cheerful as Steve’s is, then. That’s just aces.

And then—

And then the wall of sound hits like a slap to the eardrums and Steve—idiot animal impulse to duck for cover, full-body flinch, and outta the corner of his gaze he can see Bucky whirling around, knife up and ready to throw. And then—

And then his brain picks out a drum line.

Jesus Christ, it’s music, it’s—

From outside. Pounding through the concrete walls. It’s BAST, turning up the pressure, turning up the volume—music, Goddamn surround sound, to go with the flashing lights and the human body blockade and—and the sun’s just about up, so Sam’s gonna take to the skies any minute now.

Technicolor distraction, holding the world’s gaze, so if Hydra start shit here, every nation in the world is gonna see ‘em.

“What the Hell?” Bucky asks, slowly shifting outta his stance, and Steve can just hear him past the thud of the music. Enhanced senses are fuckin’ great right up until someone in your building wants to marathon _True Blood_ on TV all night long, or have extra onions on their lunch. Or crank the music up to _war crimes_ kinda volumes. “Is that...”

“Can’t exactly Lindy Hop to it,” Steve says, and he gets a wild-eyed look in reply for a good couple seconds until Buck—and maybe he’s remembering, or maybe he’s just putting together outta context clues what the Christ a _Lindy Hop_ is, and then—

And then Steve scoops up his shield and they’re moving out again. Forward march—they got two more anchors to place, a factory full of weapons to destroy, and STRIKE’s ambush ain’t gonna trigger itself.

*******

West, across the factory floor to the far end. The roller door is halfway down between here and there, between the original factory building and the second half of the complex, the factory extension.

Steve—he can remember from studying the floor plans of this place eight days ago: old factory and new factory, fire-proof door in between, offices scattered at either end of the complex and the loading bay at the west end, closest to where it presses against the road of the cul-de-sac.

They duck under the roller door and into—into half-light, soot-grey shadow where BAST’s light show can’t follow ‘em, skylight overhead and half the windows boarded over after last week, the firefight with Fury’s mercenary team, bullets and Clint’s arrows slicing through glass and flesh and open air.

There’s a dark stain on the concrete under Steve’s boots. Old blood, soaked in to stain. He can still smell gunpowder and fear-sweat past the hot electric stink of wires and circuits, plastic and metal.

The music is—it’s muffled some, here; BAST must only have the one set of speakers. Gives way to the slow churning mechanical hum of—a couple of these big ugly machines are switched on, idling, maybe warming up for the day, rumbling low and mindless.

Dark, noisy. Good spot for an ambush.

“Stay close,” Steve says, and prowls forward.

Middle of the factory floor and—and there’s a shattered circle divot in the concrete where Steve landed shield-first eight days ago and—and Steve stops, looks around again. There’s something—

—brushing at the edge of his awareness, and if he were wolf-shaped he’d be bristling, all down his spine. There’s something...

Machines, concrete. Plywood covering the open mouth of the skylight overhead. He can’t hear—he can hear too damn much, is the problem. Machines rumbling and music throbbing and a half-thousand or so folks right outside, moving around and shouting and laughing and chanting and—and it’s information overload, it’s _noise_.

Steve sinks further into wolf-brain, breathing deep to scent the air—hot metal, wires, plastic parts. Rubber stink of conveyor belts. Old blood, piss. The soaked-in human stink of the folks who work here, their sweat and shampoo and—deodorant.

Artificial pine-stink deodorant—ahh, _fuck_ —

“ _Hey, asset_ —”

—comes from the right, from across the factory floor, and Steve pivots—

Meets the green gaze of thermal imaging goggles. Levelled at them, staring right at ‘em—

Christ, they might as well not even be wearing a veil. They’re _cooked_ —

Brock Rumlow steps up onto the bed of a machine conveyor belt. The machine that’s still running, thumping and whirring emptily, mindlessly—providing cover, hiding Rumlow’s pulse, his breathing.

He’s holding—it’s a some kinda long boxy handheld cannon, orange lighting up the outside of the barrel, gleaming hot as Satan’s crotch and—

And he’s staring right at Bucky.

Steve grabs for Buck, for the dog tags at his throat, the silencing veil—gotta turn his ears off, keep him safe—snarls his fingers into the chain and _hauls_ at the spell inside and—

“ _Sputnik_ ,” Rumlow says—

—and Bucky drops, like he’s stepped off a cliff into open air. Like he’s gutshot, headshot, falling limp as a sack of potatoes. Limp as a corpse.

The chain snaps as he falls, torn. There’s the _ping_ of one of the tags hitting the concrete, loud as a gunshot and—

He’s not breathing.

He’s not breathing he’s _not breathing he’s_ —

“How about that?” Rumlow asks, teeth bared in a mad grin under the green blank of the thermal imaging goggles, and then—and then he levels the barrel of the fuck-off cannon at them—at Buck, and Steve—

Throws himself down, _crack_ of his knees hitting concrete on either side of Bucky’s head with 230 pounds of momentum behind them, shield up to cover Buck, his face and torso, to cover Steve’s torso, curling in low and close and—

The cannon fires—it’s musical, a huge ringing _craaaang_ like a church tower going up in flames, and Steve—

He’s down, sprawled, his bell ringing and ears ringing and—Mother of _Christ_ —

—caught the blast of—is it some kinda beam weapon? He’s blinking, processing, splashes of fire-orange spillover light seared into his corneas around the edge of the shield.

Caught the blast on a shit angle and didn’t have time to brace and now he’s down, dull ache of impact on the back of his skull, on his ass, scrabbling for purchase, for—shield. Still in his hand, fingers biting into the strap—just he can’t feel his hand, flesh and bone humming-numb.

Jesus wept—get up, _get up_ you dumb piece of shit—

Rolls and scrambles up, shield coming up to protect centre mass—he’s a good six feet back from where he started, and Rumlow is—advancing, grinning, cannon lighting up again like it’s cycling to fire and _oh_ _fuck_ —

Another shrieking blast—

—square on the shield this time, and he’s braced for it, ready for it, the beam spilling and splitting out and around the curve of the shield to slice lines of fire into the ceiling, walls, floor, like the hand of God sketching an architectural study in flame.

Throws Steve back again, maybe another yard, back-pedaling hard to stay up on his feet.

And Rumlow is advancing, marching across the factory floor, almost level with where Buck is sprawled on the concrete and—and past the howling in his ears, Steve can hear the crunch of booted feet, the ringing hum of the cannon powering up again—

Gets a few seconds between shots—like the laser rifles Hydra used a million-some years ago, needed to cool down between cycles of firing or the barrel started to warp, distorted by the heat.

So Steve’s got a couple seconds to—

Lean back and twist around on himself, bringing the shield back and coil tight, muscle and tendon and bone pulling taut and—

And _go_ —throws the shield, everything he’s got behind it.

The shield edge slams into the glowing mouth of the cannon and—there’s a _crunch_ , metal and carbon fibre giving way, yielding to the vibranium and—

—and the cannon kicks back in Rumlow’s arms, spitting sparks and—and he drops it, shoved staggering back a couple steps.

The shield shears away, bouncing off and back—behind Steve, somewhere, can hear the _crang_ of edge meeting the concrete wall.

“Son of a—” Rumlow spits, mouth twisting and—and then he looks at Steve again, grins, shoves his thermal imaging goggles up into his hair.

“Got you now, dipshit,” Rumlow says, and—oh, Christ.

Steve’s fucking veil is down, shot to bits. God Almighty, what a clusterfuck.

Buck—he’s exposed too. Their veils were linked. He’s down and he’s visible and he’s vulnerable and—not dead, please, not fuckin’ dead, just—

Rumlow dances a half-step forward and kicks the maimed cannon at Steve’s face.

Shit—distracted, _Goddamn idiot_ , keep your eyes on the _fuckin’ game_ and—and Steve fades back, to the side, left arm up to deflect the cannon and—

Glancing blow of white heat to his palm, forearm, like he’s slapped a stovetop, and then it’s falling, crunch and clatter hitting concrete and—and Rumlow’s coming through right after it, head down and running at Steve like he’s coming down the home stretch.

Ploughs into Steve, shoulder into his gut and shoving, heaving back and—and Steve’s off-centre, staggering back and into—hollow boom of his skull, heels, ass hitting metal, hitting—it’s one of the factory machines, looming like a Goddamn ugly monolith in the half-light of the factory and Rumlow is latched onto Steve’s left arm at the elbow and forearm and shoving, up, sting of burnt skin pulling and tearing and—

Steve plants his left foot, coils up his right leg—and Rumlow’s too close to kick so it’s a shove with his knee, awkward, swinging around with his right elbow and Rumlow dances back, staggering, and Steve goes to follow and—

Pulls up short, bite of metal around his left—Christ. It’s a cuff, some kinda mag-cuff around his left wrist, holding him pinned to the side of this fuckin’ machine.

“What the Hell?” Steve asks, reefing at it—shit. There’s not a fuckin’ hint of give—the cuff is strong. Calibrated for a super soldier kinda strong. And he’s got no Goddamn leverage, not with his arm way the Hell up above his head like this.

What a pain in the Goddamn ass.

“How’s about _that_?” Rumlow jeers again, like the fuckin’ idiot he is—fading back outta Steve’s kicking range and grinning like a sociopath on Christmas morning.

Steve lifts his left foot, gropes for the knife holstered in his boot, pulls it free and flips his grip and throws and—

Rumlow ducks, weaving to the side, contemptuously casual. He’dhad all fuckin’ day to see that move coming, what with how fuckin’ awkward Steve’s moving right now. Son of a—

“Bitch move, Rogers,” Rumlow says, swaying back to a square stance. “Always knew you’d Goddamn _devolve_ , the second you lost home field advantage. Big man not so big, huh?”

“Go screw yourself,” Steve grits out, planting both feet and throwing his weight into it and heaving with every fuckin’ thing he’s got— _fuck_. The thing doesn’t so much as Goddamn shift. It’s tight, snug to his skin, fits like a Goddamn glove.

“See, the boss wants me to bring you in alive,” Rumlow says. “They want you still breathing when we start cutting you up, find out what makes your gears turn, freak.”

He unclips the holster at his hip, draws his Glock, holds it down at his side. “But if you don’t wanna play ball, I’m sure they won’t care too much if I give ‘em a corpse.”

Steve’s got another knife holstered at the small of his back. No point trying to throw the damn thing—he needs Rumlow closer. Or—or he needs to get closer to Rumlow.

Needs out of this fucking cuff.

He can’t brute force it, but—there’s always the other way.

Buy some time, gotta—keep him talking, keep the smug motherfucker _talking_ —

“What did you do to Bucky?” Steve blurts, the first Goddamn thing he can think of, and—

He fixes his gaze somewhere on Rumlow’s torso and focuses in, in. On the feel of his aorta leaping in his abdomen and the swell of air in his lungs, pressing out through the ribcage. On the weight of metal on his third finger, right hand, the pawn shop wedding band he’d bought a half hour before they caught their ride outta Atlantic City, on—

Rumlow barks a clipped laugh. “You know, I didn’t think it’d work? Throwing the Soldier at you, like distracting a guard dog with a bone. But it worked a fuckin’ treat. You were too busy tearing up over _your pal Bucky_ to notice us taking over the country in front of your Goddamn nose. Same as tossing Hammer under the bus, so everyone looked at the FBI instead of SHIELD—shit, it was so easy. And then when we found out about _you_ —”

Steve hauls the anchored shapeshifting spell out and through, cramming it into his flesh, meat and bones and cells, fast and ugly—now, _now_ , before Rumlow can respond—

And he’s in his little body, yelling through the insane blaze of agony _sweet Christ that hurt like nothin’ on Earth and_ —and he’s hanging by his left wrist, hung from the side of this fuckin’ machine like an idiot marionette.

Lunges up with his right hand to catch his left hand and—thumb, there, fold tight into the palm and _squeeze hard_ and he can hear the pop of his thumb dislocating somewhere past the howl of the music, soaring through him like gale-force winds, like spill water flooding out of a dam.

And then he braces his feet against the machine at his back, gathers all of his shit together, and tears _down_ and—

The cuff is looser, on his bony little wrist. There’s wiggle room. Enough to move, enough to get some momentum, enough to—

Tear his wrist, hand, down and through, and he falls to the floor and rolls forward and _Jesus Christ have mercy_ his hand hurts like a son of a bitch, stings like a thousand wasp bites, raw and tender as—oh, right. The skin is sliced open, folded up across his back of his hand. Like a glove turned inside out. That’s sinew and muscle and a fuckload of blood, dislocated thumb sticking out like the last tree standing in a carpet-bombed waste.

_Crack_ of gunfire—overhead, Rumlow aiming for where Steve was half a second ago. Keep moving, you dumb piece of shit, keep moving—

Lunges forward, low and messy, good hand trailing on the concrete to keep his balance, and Rumlow is back-pedaling, correcting his aim, bringing the gun down to—

Steve slaps his ruined hand over his sternum—dermal piercing number seven, quick-deploy veil, _go._ Can feel the spell drop over him mid-stride, like he’s crossed a threshold into driving rain, cold-static feel falling over his skin, weighing down the ends of his hair. Makes him invisible to the naked eye.

And Rumlow, dumb piece of shit that he is, is wearing his thermal imaging goggles up on top of his head. Because gloating face to face is more important than finishing the fuckin’ job.

Steve jinks to the left, gets a good couple yards out from where he oughta be—and Rumlow fires blind, hard slap of gunfire into the Steve-shaped gap and then—and then he’s head up, eyes up, back-pedaling further and groping for the goggles in his hair, hauling them down again—

To Hell with that—Steve grits his teeth, goes deep and hauls up a fistful of the power of unmaking, rising through the core of him like magma shoving up and through the Earth’s crust. Shapes the hex, fast and ugly, and pitches it overhand, something like a rippling snarl spilling out of his mouth as he lets it go, the surge of pain like he’s laying copper wire down in his veins and sticking his finger in a power socket and—

Rumlow gets the goggles situated on his stupid fuckin’ face. Scans the space, gun up, looking for—and then he jolts when he finds Steve, half-crouched like a fuckin’ gargoyle in the middle of the factory floor, staring at Rumlow with his inhuman eyes, blood drooling in a steady stream from his fucked hand.

He’s maybe baring his fangs some. There _is_ tactical advantage in scaring the shit outta the other guy.

“Shit,” Rumlow barks, and—

“Hey, fuckhead,” Steve says at the same time.

Rumlow whips the gun around, smooth as a well-oiled machine, aim and fire and—and the trigger hinges away from the trigger guard, away from the frame, and then the magazine slides out of the grip.

There’s a half-second pause, Rumlow’s green gaze cocked to stare at the Glock in his hand, gently sliding to pieces. And then he throws it aside—and Steve uncoils, hauls the knife outta his back holster, and runs at him.

He can’t hide. Can’t just hex the goggles and go dark, off the radar, come back in at a better angle. Bucky is sprawled on the concrete floor, vulnerable, maybe out cold or maybe—he’s _vulnerable_ , and he’s Steve’s Goddamn everything and that means he’s also Steve’s weak spot.

And the second Rumlow isn’t occupied with trying to put Steve in the dirt, he’s free to—to maybe do worse to Bucky.

There’s worse fates than dead.

He runs, ploughs straight at Rumlow, knife held low and out to the side—Rumlow swings, fast and dirty, fist coming around for Steve’s head and Steve ducks, weaves under and inside Rumlow’s guard, comes up slashing for the groin—

Rumlow turns, pivots a half-step—Steve’s knife-tip snags in fabric for half a second and then pulls free and Rumlow’s elbow comes up to meet him and—

And Steve slams on the brakes, hard-stop on his forward momentum, clips the hard edge of Rumlow’s elbow in the neck—Christ on a crutch—breath coming tight and thin and Jesus wept, that was too close. That’s gonna fuckin’ bruise—fall back a couple steps to catch a breath in past the ache pressing on his throat.

Rumlow follows, grabbing at his belt for—it’s a stun baton, thumbing the handle to send voltage burning into the metal, and he’s baring teeth, threat display, baton held out in front—he’s learned not to let Steve get inside his reach—

Steve keeps treading back—he can’t disappear, but what if he—like when he sparred with Matt, with the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen—grasping at threads of fire from the well in his belly and casting the spell, clumsy conjuring gestures with his maimed left hand, wind up and release and—

The roar tears the air like the world is splitting open at the seams, blood-red fury and fear and horror and rage, rage, no rhythm or reason—the Hulk, insane with anger and ready to fight the Goddamn sun, and Steve’s only ever seen Banner’s _other guy_ in action all of twice, but that sound is tattooed into his fuckin’ hindbrain.

He’s broadcasting it from across the factory floor, and Rumlow’s flinch is pure animal instinct, half-turning to look back and face going slack with fear and—

There’s nothing there. No point conjuring a seeming—he’ll look right through it with those fuckin’ goggles on. Steve just needs to buy a second, enough time to—

He’s throwing himself forward, knife coming up and aiming for the throat, bare skin, unarmoured, open—

Rumlow’s turning back, shoulder coming up to protect his neck, and Steve’s shot hits Kevlar and bounces up—

Punches blade first into Rumlow’s left cheek, maybe an inch away from his mouth. Steve can feel the _clack_ of the knife tip hitting clenched teeth and stopping and Rumlow recoils, tears himself back, away—

Slices open the meat from cheek to mouth.

Rumlow screams, fury and pain, garbled with blood. Heaves up an elbow—clips Steve in the sternum and he’s fading back and—Rumlow comes across, stun baton hammering for Steve’s gut.

Steve sucks it in, turns his torso a couple inches, lets the tip of the baton graze across his armoured belly, takes a dive for the concrete.

In Steve’s experience, an asshole will never resist the urge to kick you when you’re down.

Hits the concrete like a sack of shit and lets out a broken yelp like he’s hurt, hurt real bad, and Rumlow steps in, baton cocked, iron-red streaking down over his jaw. Steve breathes in—

—holds—

—plants his left foot boot-down on the concrete and coils his right leg up and aims a stamping kick at Rumlow’s groin and—

Rumlow catches his boot maybe two inches out from ground zero.

“Bitch,” he spits, and then he plants the business end of the stun baton against Steve’s calf.

It’s white-out pain, a supernova surging through his nerve endings, convulsing muscle against bone, arching his spine and pulping his tissue against the ground and he’s distantly aware that he’s wailing like—like when Handsome Joe, one of the wolves in Steve’s Greenland pack, was gored by a bull reindeer. Took over two days to die.

Thing is—thing is, Steve knows pain.

Steve knows pain like bone strands splitting and shearing, muscle tearing fibre by fibre, skin stretching taut to breaking, every Goddamn time he shifts shape. He knows gunshot and gut shot, knows broken bones, knows drowning in salt water and drowning in his own spit and phlegm and blood. He knows the pain of heart tissue starved of blood and air and slowly dying in his chest.

He knows the pain of forcing his soul to stay housed in his frozen corpse, the pain of cells split open by ice crystals and bone marrow turned hard as granite, as he used the firestarter spell to claw his way outta the ice. For the better part of—Christ only knows how long that fuckin’ went on for. Maybe a decade.

Pain ain’t broken him yet.

Rumlow lets off with the baton, swings back again and—

And Steve throws up his left hand, throws the hex he’s cobbled together in the in-breath pause between one shock and the next—heaves the curse square into Rumlow’s ugly fuckin’ face. Into the thermal vision goggles.

The _crunch_ of metal and plastic shattering is like a choir of angels singing.

Rumlow howls—drops the baton and staggers back, hands going to his face, clawing at the ruined goggles, at—shards of hardened plastic left behind, standing out from the meat of his face—above his left eye, and just over his right cheekbone, and—

Rumlow takes his hands away. His left eye is a wet red mess.

“Fuck,” Rumlow roars, and Steve heaves himself over onto his belly, tries to— _fuck_ , no. His legs aren’t gonna hold him. Whole right leg is numb up to mid-thigh, static sparks of nerve-pain firing up into his pelvis every time he tries to move it.

He gets his elbows under him, hauls his carcass over the concrete, getting some distance—needs a weapon.

Christ, he needs a weapon, dropped his knife when he was convulsing under the stun baton and only God knows where it’s ended up. He needs—

Stops. Takes a breath. Closes his eyes and goes inside and starts conjuring.

“Rogers,” Rumlow howls, and Steve shoves until he flips onto his side, can see Rumlow—tossing aside a shard of broken plastic and staring at him with the one Goddamn eye he’s got left.

Breathe out. Keep pulling—threads of magic, of the fires from his belly, folding the spell together—

“You ugly little _freak_ ,” Rumlow spits, coming wet with blood from the ruin of his mouth, and—

“Yeah, only my Mam gets to call me that,” Steve answers, and puts his right hand out low, like he’s fighting for balance, and he _pulls_ , pulls at the thread of spell in the back of his head.

Rumlow lurches forward, scoops up his stun baton in mid-stride and keeps walking, quick march, crunch of heavy boots over broken glass and the rising tide of his song, acoustic guitar notes squealing like a crippled horse and a metallic _crunch_ , _crunch_ in time with his footfalls, with the liquid lurch of Steve’s heart, and—

Steve takes a deep breath in. Holds it. His hand is out, open, shaking with the strain, and he _pulls_ with everything he’s got and—

Across the factory floor, there’s a crunch of concrete giving way and—

Scream of vibranium cutting through the air and Rumlow is here, right Goddamn here, planting himself where Steve’s sprawled across the concrete and he squares up and drops his weight onto one heel, other foot going back like he’s gonna try for a field goal and—

The kick lands square and clean in Steve’s sternum. Right between his tits. He hears the wet crack of bone giving way, blazing roar of pain right through the centre of him, weight like someone’s set down a piano right over his heart and—

He throws his right hand up and catches his shield.

He’s down, on the ground. In his real body. He can’t turn himself with the shield’s momentum, take the worst of the bite off. Can’t absorb the impact with skin and tendons and bone like concrete, more-than-human strong.

The shield slices clean through the meat of his palm, muscle and tendon and vein. Stops when it hits bone, biting deep, shattering.

The pain is blinding, incandescent, numb-white blazing up his arm. He can hear himself screaming—brings up his raw-meat left hand to catch the other side of the shield, other edge of the rim, and the weight on his chest doubles, broken breastbone creaking with the movement—

Holds. Holds the shield steady, between ruined hands. Star in the centre of the metal pointed square at Rumlow’s face.

Rumlow—hesitates for half a second, wild-eyed astonishment on his blood-streaked face, and then—and then snarling, cold as a Goddamn lizard, moving, winding up, stun baton going up and back, his whole body twisting with like he’s a clockwork mechanism winding tight and—

Steve howls—clamps down on the metal of the shield with maimed fingers—feeling for the spell in the centre of the shield, his parachute spell— _break glass in case of emergency_ —

Thing is—it’s not really a parachute spell.

It’s a _go-away_ spell.

And he’s been layering it into the metal like coats of lacquer for the last two years.

“ _Fuck off_ ,” he screams, and hauls it out and through, every layer of _go-away_ spell _uncoiling_ all at once.

It kicks like a Goddamn mule.

Slams Steve back into the concrete, hard—both ways, it’s gotta shove both ways, equal and opposite reaction—dull crack of his skull bouncing off the concrete and—

Rumlow doesn’t have concrete at his back to brace against.

He goes _up_ —neat parabola, like the artillery boys aiming their big guns high to hit someplace that’s close. Shoots straight fuckin’ up like someone has turned this place upside down, like a petty child-God is throwing his toys in a tantrum—startled shout punched out of him and his arms flying out, open like he’s seeking an embrace and—

Meets the bottom edge of the metal catwalk overhead with a _crunch—_ like something outta the back of the butcher’s shop, Mr Griedy taking a steer apart with hammer and chisel, splitting bone from joint with a dull wet _crack_ —

And then he drops.

Lands next to Steve, maybe all of three feet away. Dead weight.

There’s a Godawful silence.


	19. Chapter 19

Steve lies on the concrete of the factory floor, staring at the scuffed inside of his shield. Head ringing like a struck bell, where he’s dented his Goddamn skull between the floor and the almighty kick of his hundred-layers-deep _fuck off_ spell.

He can hear himself, breathing, hard and wet. Can’t hear much of anything else.

Not outta Rumlow, slumped on the concrete like a sack of spuds.

Not outta Bucky—he can’t hear Buck breathing, can’t— _oh Christ_ , oh—

Jesus. Jesus, Mary and Joseph—okay. Okay, he’s gotta—

Gotta let go of the shield, for starters. His right hand hurts like he’s dipped it in fire, screaming pain across the palm, smearing out into a dull ache up his fingers and down into his wrist.

He’s gotta tug at the shield with his left hand, to get it free. Comes away with a red-white sliver stuck to the rim, which—oh. Oh, that’s bone. That’s a chunk of bone from Steve’s Goddamn hand, that’s—

Blaze of anguish in his sternum as he heaves himself over, rolls to the side just enough and—and he’s puking, last of his pre-mission protein bar coming up grey and green.

Jesus fucking Christ. Oh Mam, Mam— _I’ve fucked it all up, Mam, I’m sorry_ —

Shit— _Christ_. Come on, man, get it together.

He’s—world is gone grey around the edges, chest is tight as a vice clamping down. Catching sips of breath, gasped in and keened out around the Godawful weight and pressure down the centre of his chest—fractured sternum, ribs, maybe both. He needs to breathe, needs to _breathe_ , needs—

Shapeshift. He can shapeshift, fix this, just needs to—

Emergency Cap-shape, in the first of his piercings. He gropes with his left hand, fingertips bled numb, up the middle of his chest, feeling the press of his shirt and fingertips like points of ice driving into him, into—

Five. He’s only got five piercings. Top two musta torn out—he finds raw skin, stinging points of pain against the backdrop of grinding pressure in his breastbone, ribs—there. There, two of ‘em, loose bits of metal, pressed against his ribs, between him and the floor.

What a pain in the Goddamn ass. Fuck’s sake—here, fishing up and under his shirt—fabric rubbing on the raw meat of his wrist, across the back of his hand—

Gotcha.

Fingertips wet-slick with blood and sweat and—and he’s clamping onto those two blunt nubs of metal, hauling ‘em out from under and onto the concrete floor— _chiming_ ring of medical-grade titanium on concrete.

One, two.

Nudges at one with a fingertip—he’s humming, breathless, animal whine coming out through bit-together lips, shaking with the pain, with—no, no, wrong spell. Other one.

Grabs up the other dermal anchor. Takes the best kinda breath he can. Pulls the spell out and through.

And he’s howling, writhing, lightning-white blaze of pain in his chest, in the tattered meat of his hands, rolling like the dumb animal of his body thinks this is the kinda hurt he can get away from. Gets a front row seat view of the skin and fascia and flesh of his left hand unrolling like a carpet and stitching back down over muscle and bone again, bloodless pale as death, and Christ knows how much concrete grit and other shit he’s got sandwiched in there now.

What a Goddamn clusterfuck.

And then done, pain guttering and gone like a fire starved of air.

He’s lying twisted up in his own blood, Cap sized, twitching and shaking with aftershocks and—

And he’s rolled in the vomit. There’s puke in his hair. Fuck Steve’s life.

Okay, so he’s gotta— _Bucky_. Needs to get to Bucky, needs to—

Push up, get hands and knees under him. He lurches up to his feet—clink of metal hitting concrete. Another dermal falling loose from his shirt—musta got torn, pushed the rest of the way out when he shifted.

And—and there’s Buck, still sprawled limp on the floor right where he Goddamn fell.

Please— _Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum_ —please, Mother. Please, God.

Steve can—he’s staggering, pushing forward on legs gone limp as overcooked spaghetti—he can hear his own heartbeat, rapid and stuttering, the great wheezing heave of air in and out of his lungs.

He can hear the crowd of BAST protesters outside the factory, like a king tide welling up against the very edges of the canals, massed human bodies shouting and singing and moving together.

He can hear—Rumlow, that’s Rumlow, breathin’ irregular and wet, convulsive squeeze of his heart dysrhythmic and slow.

He can’t hear—please, Buck, sweetheart, you gotta—

Gets to Bucky and goes to his knees like a sinner felled with prayer at the altar. Buck is bloodless pale, his limbs limp and loose, tattered locks of hair across his face and his eyes half-open, blank and staring and soulless and—

His chest lifts. Sinks.

Once.

The huff of his breath is so soft Steve almost can’t hear it past the shifting roar of the crowd outside, past the dumb sob that spills outta Steve’s mouth—

He’s breathing.

Jesus Christ Almighty—he’s _breathing_. His heart is beating. It’s slow, so slow—Steve gropes for the exposed skin of his throat, finds the pulse point and presses in deep so he can feel it, the shift of blood and tissue under his fingertips.

Slow, regular.

He’s alive.

Steve chokes out another sob, shoves his spare hand over his mouth to push ‘em back, smother the helpless animal keen that wants to spill out of him.

He’s alive. _Bucky’s alive_. Out Goddamn cold—is he comatose? Catatonic? What the Christ did that trigger word do to him—but alive.

“ _Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum_ ,” Steve chokes out, and then he hiccups and it turns into a sob and he’s folding forward, hand clapped over his mouth again. Buries his face against Bucky’s shoulder, the tangled mess of his hair. Holds there, shaking, muffling the broken canine whines coming outta his mouth into the fabric of Bucky’s tac jacket.

His fault. He pulled Buck into this, into this Goddamn shit fight, into the line of fire, and now—and now he’s—

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, tries to say. Shapes his mouth around the words, presses them into the side of Bucky’s neck, but he can’t get enough breath behind them to give them sound.

“ _Cap_?”

Steve hears it like it’s coming from underwater, distant and distorted and—

His comms earpiece. Came outta his ear while he was brawling with Rumlow.

“ _Rogers, come in_ ,” comes again—Sam’s voice.

Christ. Christ on a bike—he’s got a job to do.

Gotta get up.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Steve rasps, finger-combing the mess of Bucky’s hair back off his face. Presses a kiss on the hairline, square in the middle of his forehead.

Buck’s heartbeat doesn’t shift. Pulse, breathing—slow as pack ice shifting, slow as geological ages passing. His eyelids don’t so much as flicker.

He’s a long way off, a long way down. And Steve wants to pick him up, carry him outta here keening like a widow at the graveside, find some help—someone, _anyone_ with _any Goddamn idea_ how to fix this.

And he can’t. There’s gotta be close to a thousand BAST protesters out there now, risking their lives: Trip and Nadya and Amber and Naveen, Sam in his wing suit like some kinda guardian angel, if angels were equipped by military contractors. There’s Natasha, and Clint and Matt, Tony and Hill and SHIELD and the entire Goddamn populace—of the United States, and the world after that.

Hydra isn’t gonna stop until they’ve devoured the whole planet and spit it back out in their image. Neat, and obedient, and silent.

He needs to finish the job.

Steve gets up, walks back over to—his comms unit is on the floor, halfway under a crate. Fishes it out and jams it back in his ear. “This is Rogers.”

“ _You taking a nap in there_?”

Sam sounds—there’s distortion on the comms line. Wind, air pressure, buffeting against his mic. Because he’s flying—sun’s gotta be up by now, which means Sam will be in the air, turning laps above the factory and making sure the eyes and lenses of the world’s press stay focused here and—and he’s providing air support, if the shit hits the fan.

Worse’n it already has, anyway. More shit. Bigger fan.

Steve moves back over to Buck, drops into a squat, scoops him up—metal arm, heaving up until the rest of his torso comes with, up and over Steve’s shoulder, graceless fireman carry. Leaves him a hand free to nudge his comms and respond. “Met an old friend, got caught up chattin’. What’s going on out there?”

“ _We’ve got incoming_ ,” Sam answers. “ _Army. Musta come out of Fort Dix. I count eight trucks, a couple M1A1s. Looks like a company’s worth of grunts_.”

Christ on a crutch—Steve moves over to the far wall, bends and lowers Buck back down—slow, careful. Someplace outta the way. He doesn’t have time to make this pretty, or dignified. As long as he’s out from underfoot—digs up and under his shirt again, for the base of his sternum.

The last of his piercings is a veil.

Steve dig with blunt fingertips, bitten off fingernails, bites in under the edge of the metal and rips, hissing—Christ, that fuckin’ stings. Drops down again and shoves the piece of jewellery into the front pocket of Bucky’s jeans.

“Tanks?” he asks Sam—Holy Mary, Mother of God. “Which Goddamn psychopath at Fort Dix accepted an order to deploy Abrams tanks against civilian protesters?”

Steve pulls the veil spell through and out as he’s tugging his hand free and—and Bucky winks out of sight, gone like a snuffed out candle flame.

Hidden, safe. It’s the best Steve can do for him, right now.

“ _Could be they’re getting bad intel_ ,” Sam says. His voice comes distorted, the whip crack of air moving around him, wail of the wind pressing against his comms piece. Steve can picture him, wings out, carving circles in the sky above the factory, Hydra’s goons, the besieging line of protesters. “ _Could be they’re being made to comply._ ”

Jesus wept. This changes—everything. That kinda firepower is—“Sam, you’ve gotta pull the civilians outta here.”

“ _Copy_ ,” Sam answers, and Steve straightens up, one hand drifting to the pocket of his tactical rig so he can feel the weight of—two anchors, still to be placed.

There’s a crescent-shaped gouge in the wall where his shield was lodged, cracks snaking out like veins through the cement. Steve shoves an anchor blade into one of those cracks, see-sawing and pushing until there’s only a half-inch of the blade still out in the air. Not goin’ nowhere.

Northernmost point of the grid. One more anchor to go.

And there are Goddamn tanks inbound, and hundreds of human souls out there, buying him time to get the job done. He can’t let them pay for that time in blood. Gotta get his ass into gear.

Can’t shapeshift, not yet. Not this soon.

And his _break glass in case of emergency_ anchored veil spell is draped across one JB Barnes. Stealth is off the table.

Gotta do this fast and ugly.

Steve scoops up his shield and _runs_.

Hits the door into the loading bay at ramming speed, shield up—crunch of wood and metal giving way, splinters shooting off—and through and—

Black tac suits, rifles coming up. He’s counting heads, helmets, targets, looking for vulnerabilities or insignia or—it’s STRIKE Alpha. Minus Rumlow’s idiot sneering face. They’re formed up around a stack of crates, the open maw of the back of a truck—more weapons. Always more Goddamn weapons.

Rifles coming up, levelling at Steve and he’s halfway across the loading bay and accelerating—

Tactical disadvantage—it’s an open space, and they’ve got the numbers. So Steve’s gotta use the terrain.

Forklift to his right—Steve course-corrects, quick shoe-shuffle to the right, leaps and lands with one booted foot in the middle of the boxy chassis in the back. Heaves forward—plants his spare hand on the skeletal overhead guard—jumps and shoves and—

High ground. Use the terrain.

And he’s vaulting, up and forward and over the front of the machine—legs coiling up and forward and—three of the STRIKE guys clustered right there, using the forklift for cover. They didn’t plan for—

Steve hits ‘em like a howitzer shell dropping out of the sky, shield and boots first. Drops 230-some pounds of meat and bones and vibranium on ‘em at full speed and there’s the splintering crack of helmets of splitting, wet crunch of bones breaking, broken off yelps and—and Steve’s rolling across his shield—scrape of the paint on concrete—and up again.

Three down. Keep moving.

Two guys—there, ducking behind the truck, rifles up—crack of gunfire and Steve feels the hum in his shield as a bullet shears off the metal like water offa greased wool.

He drops his head and hikes up the shield—makes himself a smaller target—runs at them, hard, putting all he’s got into the piston pump of calves, thighs, up into his hips and belly, killing speed—

They fade back—around the corner, behind the rear compartment of the truck. Into cover. Using the terrain—it’s a good move, tactically, means he’s gotta come around that corner blind and into their line of fire if he wants ‘em, so—

Use the terrain.

Steve course-corrects, jigs to the left. Runs full-pelt into the side of the truck.

_Crunch_ of the metal bed buckling and howl of rubber on concrete and the whole ass-end of the truck turns, pivots, swings a good five feet outta Steve’s way, jolted up off its tyres and—and twin thumps from the far side, truck bed finding meat and bone.

Two more down. Turn and—

Four dark eyes, rifle barrels, all pointing at him—they’ve formed up together, across the bay—

Clatter of gunfire—and Steve shifts, more’n human quick, brings his shield around. Purr of vibranium—more bullets winging offa the curved surface and—

Blazing howl of fire punching into Steve’s left hip, right thigh.

Fuck’s sake. He needs cover, needs—

Crates, the boxed weapons. He sinks low as he can behind the shield—wail of pain up his right leg. Christ Almighty, the bullet is still in there somewhere. Son of a bitch—skips back and to the right, in behind the stacked up crates.

Keep low, keep down—crunching patter of bullets hitting wood, the metal and plastic of the weapons inside.

Buys Steve a couple of seconds.

Deep breath—this is gonna hurt—

Steve plants himself. Uncoils to a stand, shield up—enough to get a glimpse of the bay, get eyes on the target—

Leans right the Hell back and coils his left leg up and bent and lines up—there, right there, at the base of a box where it’s strongest, wooden struts and metal nails holding the thing together and—and he kicks, hard, kicks the Christ outta that crate like he’s trying to land it on the surface of the Goddamn moon and—

—and the whole top half of the stack explodes, crates and wooden shrapnel soaring up and out—neat parabola arcs, force and momentum and gravity meeting and marrying and carrying three of those crates the length of the bay—

—and there’s a Heavenly chorus of grunts and cries, ugly crunch of wood and bones breaking, STRIKE assholes cleaned up like bowling pins. Two of ‘em go down, ass and elbows slamming against the concrete. The other two fade to either side, ducking and staggering and—

And Steve’s yelling as he throws himself forward—Holy Mary, but this hurts. Running on this Goddamn leg hurts like _buggery_ —can feel the bullet working against the bone of his femur—throws himself forward, leaping across what’s left of the piled up crates and then he’s boots to the concrete and accelerating hard, shield up.

Slams into the first guy while he’s still staggering, reorienting, his rifle pointing at the sky like a startled exclamation mark. Shield to face—fast and ugly—like getting hit by a small truck and Steve can hear the dull percussive crack of a skull splitting inside the tac helmet.

Last guy—Steve turns and—there, last mook standing, and he’s falling back, backpedaling, rifle up and aimed for Steve’s face.

Last asshole standing.

And Steve can hear his heart beating, rasp of urgent breath, can see the minute tremors in his musculature, the hands on the rifle, in the placement of his booted feet.

Steve has worked with STRIKE Alpha more than anyone in the last couple years—he knows every one of these guys. Knows their personal strengths and vulnerabilities in combat, their blood types. If they’ve got wives or partners or kids at home—because it’s his job to know, and because he doesn’t ever wanna be the kind of CO that chews through enlisted guys like they’re game pieces, interchangeable.

He saw his share of that shit back in the War—and it starts with not bothering to learn your guys’ names, ends in sending them in where angels fear to tread. Ends in valuing the endgame over what it cost in human lives to get there.

He knows every one of the STRIKE Alpha guys. And he’s killed three of ‘em in the last forty seconds—and the other five ain’t getting up anytime soon, and this guy—

He’s wearing his tac helmet—good soldier. Could be anybody, and Steve could study his gait, his build under the layers of body armour, the stink of his particular soap and sweat and skin, work out who this guy is. Put a name to the guy he’s about to kill.

And if Steve were a good man he would.

He’s not a good man.

Steve lifts the shield over his shoulder, fixes it to the harness on his back. Prowls forward—slow, rolling, keeping most of the weight off his right leg. Watching, waiting for—

Shift in the Hydra goon’s right hand, trigger finger, and Steve rolls his head to the right. Feels the wasp-heat of the bullet fly past his left ear, and then—and then he sees the muzzle flash, blink of red-white splashed across his retinas, hears the blunt clap of gunfire. Keeps advancing.

And the guy is still backpedaling, shifting his aim—down, rifle levelled at Steve’s centre mass, and Steve breathes and watches and stalks after him, patient as a wolf over the tundra—

Twitch of muscles in the right hand and Steve half-turns, pivots to the left, feels the hum of the bullet’s passage through the air against the skin of his belly. Keeps moving forward, and—

“Shit, shit,” the asshole slurs out, and as he fires again Steve reaches out, shoves the barrel of the gun to the side—searing heat of the metal on the flat of his palm—and the bullet flies someplace past his armpit and Steve is on him, tearing the gun out of his hands and grabbing for a fistful of tac jacket, reefing the guy in close and then coming through with his other hand, closed fist—

Puts his fist into the guy’s face—helmet shattering like an egg under a hammer, skin and bone and the sudden wet against his knuckles that means he’s popped an eyeball or split the skull open.

The mook—gurgles, twitches, spasm running down the spine and legs going limp and there’s the acrid sudden stink of urine and—

Mole under the left ear, visible through the broken shards of helmet. Which means this guy is Greenwich—blood type A-neg, likes his coffee with sweetener, no sugar. Creative tactician, solid shooter, middling skill at close combat. Wife at home.

_Fuck_ Steve’s eidetic Goddamn memory.

Steve drops Greenwich—and he’s limp, breath sounds rattling wetly to a stop, goes to the ground like a sack of spuds—and then Steve is turning away, swallowing hard against the tidal surge of sick in his throat, in his belly.

Jesus Christ on a crutch—

He was Hydra. He was Hydra, and Hydra are within a Goddamn ace of taking over the world, making anyone who protests into their fuckin’ mindless sock puppet. Like they did with Sharon.

Like they did with Bucky.

So—so Steve takes a deep breath, shoves at that sick feeling until it folds down and away like a half-tent. There is exactly no time for this shit. This battle isn’t gonna wait for him.

He’s gotta—anchor. In the pocket of his tac rig. He fumbles for the velcro, jams his big dumb hand in there, fishes out the anchored spell blade. Turns the knife over in his hands and limps over to the far wall, outermost wall of the complex, westernmost point of his grid—

“ _Cap? Small problem with the protesters_ ,” comes over the comms, Sam’s voice, and—

“Sitrep?” Steve grunts, stabbing the blade deep into the wall, eye height, turning away.

Gotta get someplace central, set this firecracker off—and what’s happening outside? Christ, not more tanks—

“ _They’re not leaving_ ,” Sam says.

“They’re what?” Steve asks, and the lurching drumbeat of his boots on concrete hiccups for a half-second.

God Almighty—BAST. The civilians. They can’t _stay_ , they can’t—can’t face down the Army, face down _tanks_. Jesus, Mary and—

There’s a stuttering couple seconds over the comms, rasp of fabric and skin against the receiver at Sam’s end, and then—

“ _Is your mission completed?”_ comes over the line, and—that’s Nadya. That’s Nadya’s voice. Her French accent comes thicker when she’s pissed off.

“I—no,” Steve replies. “Ordnance planted, but I ain’t pulled the pin yet. Another couple minutes.”

And that’s—that’s just to release the hex. Then he’s gotta scrape Bucky up off the floor and haul both of their dumb asses outta here, which—he’ll bomb that bridge when he gets to it. “Nadya, you gotta get everybody out of here.”

_“We will withdraw when the job is done,”_ Nadya answers, and he can hear the soft metal chime of her bracelets moving against each other, can imagine the emphatic sweep of her arm like punctuation. “ _We were_ not drafted _, Captain. No one is being forced to be here. This is our fight._ ”

Shit. This is—this is too much, this is—

“I can’t ask you to take this kinda risk,” Steve says.

“ _Captain_ ,” Nadya says, and it comes slow, purring, like whenever he’s said something stupider than usual and she has to talk him through why he’s a Goddamn idiot. “ _BAST is not here because_ you asked it _. BAST is here because Hammer and Hydra are our enemies, as much as they are yours. Because this battle is one more skirmish in a war that has been going on since before any of us were born. And we can no more walk away from this fight than a panther can change his spots_.”

“I—” Steve starts, stops. He’s ground to a halt in the middle of the loading bay, hand to his comms unit. Now he’s listening for it, he can hear the rubber-steel-tarmac grind of tank treads churning, coming closer. Can hear the rockslide rumble of big truck engines, the whine of compression brakes.

Jesus Christ, this got FUBAR real quick.

Fuck everything—

“Copy that,” Steve says, because—because God help him, she ain’t wrong. BAST, the protesters—they aren’t safe here, but if they don’t finish this job, if Steve doesn’t take these weapons out of the equation, then no one is gonna be safe anywhere. “Sam?”

More noise on the line, thud of fingertips hitting the mic, and then Sam’s voice again: “ _Wilson here_.”

“Two more minutes, okay? I’m gonna light this birthday candle, and then we’re done. I say the word, you get everybody outta here if you gotta pick them up and carry ‘em.”

“ _Copy that_ ,” Sam says, exact same tone Steve’d used twenty seconds ago—change out the tiny comms earwig for a chunky radio receiving unit and Steve’d be back in the Goddamn Forties, on the line with any of the Commandos. The tech might change—the packaging might change, but not the gooey caramel centre.

Okay, dipshit, focus up.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Lowers his shield and presses his thumb to the pawn shop ring, third finger of his right hand, feeling the subtle static-warmth of the spell anchored there. It unfurls as he tugs at it, unspooling through his body like ice water flooding into his veins, flowing through skin and muscle and bone and—and then the pressure, like when he had his heart attack and it felt like someone was leaning on his chest but it’s all over and—

—and then the pressure digs in claws and the cold turns to howling misery and he bites down on the sleeve of his shirt, on the loose fabric because he’s shrinking, inflatable bulk falling away, keening wail muffled by fabric and—

—and done, swaying on his feet like a drunk, back in his real body and the world music swells up like groundwater, surge of the fires of making and unmaking tingling and aching in his fingertips, in the bowl of his pelvis, and—

Christ. Jesus merciful Christ, that’s—blunt-edged snarl of agony lodged in his right leg. Right thigh. It’s—ahh, fuck’s sakes—

It’s the bullet. He’s still got a Goddamn round stuck in there, right up against the femur, and the entry wound’s closed up behind it, neatly smoothed over by sorcery like running a hot knife across the surface of a cake of butter, but—

There’s a fuckin’ bullet in him.

And his body’ll push it out, if he shifts shape back and forth a few times, maybe pokes at it with a knife to give it an exfil route, but he ain’t got Goddamn time for that.

“Mother of God,” Steve slurs, and then he bites down on the inside of his cheek and starts limping forward again.

It hurts—dull background ache centred in his thigh, incandescent as a flash bang with every step he takes—down, into his knee, and up into his pelvis. Into his Goddamn balls, like a saucy little knee in the fuckin’ junk with every step he takes. He breathes, real deep and real slow to keep the nausea down to a background roar, and he limps his carcass across the loading bay, past the truck and the forklift, the scattered bodies of STRIKE Alpha, and—

Silence, sudden and thick and for half a second he’s buried under 60 feet of pack ice, the whole world muffled and just beyond his reach and his footsteps lurch, breath stopped cold as frost but then—

—but then it’s not dead quiet. Not really.

It just seems that way: the music has stopped.

The music has stopped, BAST’s sonic assault cut off cold. And now even with his garbage-heap unenhanced ears, Steve can hear the drone of the tanks on the road outside.

Outta fuckin’ time.

“ _There’s something on the roof_.” Sam’s voice, on the comms again. Steve grits his teeth and keeps moving, keeps pushing forward, because he’s gotta get this fuckin’ done, gotta finish this.

“ _Cap_?” Crack and press of wind against the mic—Sam’s in the air again. “ _There’s something on the roof. Main complex. I can’t it, but I can see—distortion in the air. Heat, movement. There’s something invisible on the Goddamn roof. You copying me?_ ”

Steve grunts acknowledgement, realises he’s not live on comms. Keeps limping his ass forward—

—through the broken door, wooden splinters shifting under his too-big boots, cold sweat beading on his back.

_It hurts, Mam, it hurts so Goddamn bad_ —what the fuck could be on the roof? Invisible like—like it’s veiled? Like someone is using sorcery up there, or—

Onto the main factory floor—past the wall of machinery, presses and belts and crooked robot arms in hazard-orange and cold steel—or—

—not sorcery. Not sorcery: he can’t hear any kinda magic, the white-noise hum of a veil spell. He’s hearing—mechanical purr and grind of machine-song, and the razor-fine shriek of electricity, and—

—and the marching-ground song he always hears around SHIELD facilities. Hears it on the helicarrier; hears it at the Triskelion; hears it on—

—quinjets. It’s a cloaked quinjet—

Around and out onto the floor, into the open and—

Alexander Pierce is standing across the factory floor, turning to watch Steve limp in with this mildly disappointed kinda look on his grandfatherly face. Like Steve’s just walked into a Goddamn PTA meeting a couple minutes late.

His hair is neatly combed. Suit is a deep charcoal with a subtle pinstripe, looks like it was hand-sewn by some fella with an Italian surname for the bargain price of Steve’s-monthly-salary-per-hour.

He’s holding a HammerTech ViceStar in one lined hand, the barrel levelled square at Bucky’s head.

“ _Cap? You reading? Shit_ ,” comes Sam’s voice on the comms, distant like he’s hollering from the very bottom of a well—

—and Steve is frozen still as a corpse, rigor mortis—

“Put down the shield, Captain Rogers,” Pierce says, and—

He’s got a fucking gun pointed at Buck’s frontal lobe. Steve drops the shield. The vibranium hums, low and musical, as it rolls forward a couple yards and then falls.

There’s a long moment of silence, of—of staring, measuring.

Bucky is still out cold, catatonic, whatever the fuck, sprawled where Steve left him and—

—and he’s _unveiled_ —how in the Christ did Pierce find him, unless—

Rumlow. Rumlow is—not where he oughta be, broken bag of bones on the concrete floor. He’s missing in action—and if he lived long enough to tell Pierce about Buck, about Steve—

Irrelevant. Rumlow ain’t here, ain’t a factor in this data set anymore.

“If you wiggle your fingers, or say _hocus pocus_ , he dies,” Pierce announces. “You disappear, you move in any way I don’t like, he dies.”

“If he dies, you ain’t gonna like what happens next,” Steve says, rasping like he’s just swallowed a fistful of crushed glass. He’s keeping his hands where Pierce can see them, every muscle and sinew pulled taut as piano wire— _hold_ , hold steady, don’t fuckin’ move, don’t fuckin’ _breathe_ —

“Is that a threat?” Pierce looks genially amused. Like this is a verbal sparring match, all points-scoring and hypotheticals. Like that ain’t an actual human soul lying on the floor with Pierce’s sidearm levelled at his brain pan.

Steve isn’t dignifying that shit with a response, but the expression on his face must answer for him—and Christ only knows what his face is doing right now; he’s putting every shred of Goddamn discipline he’s got into holding his stance steady, not a twitch outta line. Means his face is going rogue. He probably looks like a fucking serial killer.

“Then we understand each other,” Pierce says, warm and confidential like they just swapped state secrets and painted each other’s toenails.

Silence again, long and sprawling. Steve can hear shouting from outside, muffled by concrete, call and response of voices raised. Can hear the bass-note rumble of tank engines.

He stares at Pierce, keeps his breathing slow and controlled, aware in a distant kinda way of the tick starting in his right thigh, muscle fibres twitching like they’re trying to claw away from bone, away from the bullet lodged there. Ache building slow to a burn. Didn’t like walkin’ but he likes standing still even less, because you can’t fuckin’ please some people.

Pierce stares back. It’s a heavy fuckin’ gun but he’s holding it more-or-less pointed straight down—ain’t gonna get the shakes, or need to shift his stance. He studies Steve, like he’s examining a horse he’s thinking about buying—face, torso, limbs, taking in the scarification, the fangs, the whole dime’s worth of entry to the Coney Island freak show.

“Good,” Pierce says at last, like Steve’s passed Goddamn muster or—“I didn’t want to have to kill… your friend, here.”

“What the Hell _do_ you want?” Steve grits out.

“Well, to talk,” Pierce says, mouth quirking like that oughta be obvious, and—

Bucky’s _song_. It’s—it’s been muted, like someone’s gramophone playing from a house way up the street, and on a quiet night you can maybe hear it just enough to pick the tune. Like whatever Rumlow’s trigger word did to Buck sent his soul someplace far-off distant or immeasurably deep but—

But someone’s playin’ with the volume dial on that gramophone.

Bucky’s song—the scream of ice-slick steel train tracks running alongside the wail of brassy trumpet notes—it’s getting louder. Clearer.

Bucky’s fingers twitch. Once. Spasm of movement in the third, fourth, pinkie finger of his left hand. The weapon hand.

Steve’s breath catches like he’s got razor wire lining his chest cavity.

“ _Rogers? Tell me you copy, man_ ,” comes Sam’s voice on comms, and—

“I’m a student of history,” Pierce is saying, free hand closing into a fist like he’s fighting down the urge to start with the speechifying gestures. “Most statesmen are. We look at patterns—across peoples, across nations, across time. We look at how single moments can create groundswells of movement, of change. And we look at how one man can create a hinge point in history.”

Bucky’s fingers twitch again. The thumb and index finger join the party this time. Pierce doesn’t look down, doesn’t see—too busy with his stupid fuckin’ speech about— _what_ , exactly—

“I’ve followed your work for a long time, S.R.,” Pierce says, and—

Steve blinks, blinks again, trying—trying to parse that, to make _any Goddamn sense_ outta that, because—

“The operative whose work launched a thousand missiles. Conservative estimates are, you brought the War on the Western Front to a close a good two months ahead of schedule,” Pierce is saying, and—

“ _Guys? Cap’s gone silent—I think it’s FUBAR in there_ ,” Sam is saying, open comms line, and—

—and Bucky’s hand seizes again, wrist curling up, fingertips lifting away from the concrete and—

“ _Well, shit_ ,” Tony’s saying in Steve’s ear and—

Fuck. Fucking Christ—

Time to do somethin’ dumb.

*******

Thing is, you don’t gotta wave your hands or make noise to cast a spell.

It’s a Helluva lot easier if you _do_ —same way that directing Midtown traffic is easier if you can use your hands and your voice. You can get the job done with neither, with a whole lotta eyefucking and striding around and intense presence, but you’ve got your work cut out for you. Easier to point and yell.

And it’s easier to cast a spell if you can hum or sing or whistle out the tune, the flow, the song of it. If you can use the gestures of conjuring to shape the fires of making and unmaking—more here, faster, hard left.

But you can pull it off with neither, if you gotta.

In the ice. When Steve was in the ice, a big white-pale bag of frozen chicken breasts under the permafrost off Greenland, he’d cast the fire starter spell only maybe a million Goddamn times. Didn’t have his hands or his voice then, either.

Alexander fuckin’ Pierce is still talkin’—he’s—it’s something about the Corsica mission from seventy Goddamn years ago, rattling off details—number of sailors or number of torpedoes or—and Bucky’s hand is twitching, writhing—

He’s waking up. He’s pulling outta whatever nightmare Rumlow’s trigger word switched him into, which means—

Steve fixes his gaze on Pierce like he’s payin’ all the attention in the world. He fixes his face in neutral, locks every joint and tendon into place and—and then he drops his awareness down into the bowl of his pelvis, into the well of power where the fires of making and unmaking unspool from the great big universe into his twisted little shrapnel shard of a body.

There’s not a whole lot left down here. He’s been running on sorcery and spite and fuck-all sleep for the last week.

It’s enough. It’ll have to be enough.

He starts to conjure.

It’s—messy, doin’ the whole thing in his mind’s eye. Sloppy, like tying your hands behind your back and painting with your tongue: there’s spillage, waste. Power slipping from his mental grasp and drooling in searing stripes across his brain pan.

You couldn’t do anythin’ complex. Couldn’t paint some copycat Caravaggio, but—but you could maybe do a stick figure.

He can maybe conjure a veil. Before Steve learned how to drive, or to shave, or what his dick was for, he learned to conjure a veil—not to make yourself invisible, just enough—

Enough to go unnoticed.

Steve breathes, breathes up power—traces the shape of it in his mind’s eye and—and he’s twitching, reflexive spasms of muscle buried deep because this hurts, the electric sear of the fires of making and unmaking spilling out of their channels and—and the spell takes shape and it’s taking twenty Goddamn times longer than it oughta but it’s— _almost_ —

—Jesus _fuck_ —there—

Deep slow breath in and—and he’s pushing, shoving at the spell, and it feels like he’s like there’s a weight pressed to the inside of his skull, like the frontal bone is creaking, splintering under the strain and—

And breathe out.

The spell unfurls into the air, like the smell of perfume or cigarette smoke in a bubble around you, preceding you into rooms and lingering after anyplace you go. Unspools like a caught thread from a shirt sleeve and settles over Buck, fluid and formless and—

—and it’s quiet. Too quiet.

Quiet on the comms, which—makes sense, if they think Steve’s been taken, been compromised. They’re not gonna plan the next move with the line open so his imaginary captor can hear every Goddamn detail.

And quiet in the factory. Pierce has fallen silent, waiting, expectant. He’s—what, asked a question, or—or he’s waiting on the round of applause for his fuckin’ speech craft, or—he’s poised, clear blue gaze fixed on Steve and his gun hand steady. Expecting— _some_ fuckin’ thing, expecting—

Steve scratches back through the last couple minutes in his head, trying to drag up some kinda recall of—

Nothing. He’s got nothing. No eidetic memory in this shape.

Fuck it, say something, _anything_ —

“I couldn’t have done any of the things I did in the War—I wouldn’ta made it through my first op—without Bucky. Without that son of a bitch right there. Your people took a good man and maimed him down to the basement level of his soul. How the Hell do you get square with that?”

And Christ, but he’s a fuckin’ halfwit—he’s meant to be steering Pierce’s attention _away_ from Buck, not—

But Pierce doesn’t look down. His mouth twitches at one end, thinning and pulling up into something wry, like Steve’s made reference to an old inside joke.

“The Asset,” Pierce says. “Must have been strange for you. A familiar face at last, at the wrong end of the century. I’m curious—is there anything left of the real Barnes in there, do you think? You knew him before the Russians got to him. I’ve always wondered.”

_Ghoulish_ motherfucking—

“He never stopped being the real Barnes,” Steve rasps, and—Bucky’s whole left arm is twitching now. Plates shifting. The fingers spasm, muted stutter of metal fingertips bouncing off concrete—Christ, hold the veil. Hold it together. Keep this asshole talking.

“Whatever they did to him—whatever you did to him. He’s always been the real Bucky Barnes. Maybe pretending he ain’t a real person is the only way you could Goddamn sleep at night.”

“You were an _assassin,_ S.R _._ ,” Pierce replies, a grandfatherly note of laughter in his voice. “You know about the calculus of war—take this life, shed this blood, over here. Spare a thousand more lives over here. Simple equations.”

He quirks his mouth, tilts his head a little, like he’s inviting Steve into the secret.

“Hydra—we do the same calculations, just on a global scale. Destroy one good man, and shape a century. Take a dozen lives here, or a thousand—and spare _billions_ of lives. World peace, Rogers, a true and lasting peace. The cost might seem steep, from where we stand, but from the perspective of history…”

Jesus fuckin’ Christ. Piece of shit cut-rate Red Skull with the Goddamn speech— _Mother of God_.

Bucky’s elbow bends, forearm lifting away from the concrete, and there’s the muted hum of the servos in his hand as his fingers close in a fist and—and then his hand springs open and drops, back to the ground with a crunch like you’ve dropped a sack of tin cans and—

Steve stifles the idiotic animal flinch that starts from somewhere in his hindbrain, and Pierce—shifts, subtly, head coming up like—like he’s heard something, muted, muffled, and he’s tryin’ to pick where it’s come from— _fuck, keep talking—_

“Thing is, I know somethin’ about the perspective of history,” Steve says, and he’s projecting his voice, putting some of the ol’ Captain America Spangled circuit pace and pitching in there because he needs to keep Pierce eyes up, watching, listening.

“I was there, the first time Hydra tried this. And I can’t help but notice—when you’re doing those calculations. When you’re doing the math, working out _who’s_ gotta die, the purchase price on this shiny global peace of yours.”

Buck’s hand spasms again, joints clicking and whirring like he’s Goddamn _murdering_ a piano keyboard, and then it stills, freezes, and—and his forearm shifts and he’s reaching, reaching slow as pack ice melting, for the P30 holstered at his thigh.

“And those folks who end up dying. Can’t help but notice—how many of them are Black. Or brown, or Indigenous. How many of them are dirt poor, or crippled. How many of them are queer. Can’t help but notice how rarely it’s rich white fellas with nice houses in DC that have gotta die to buy your _true and lasting peace_.”

Pierce twists his mouth, half-shrugs—and the ViceStar in his hand shifts away from Bucky’s head for point-five of a second, and then back on target before Steve can even think about responding, before—

“I’ve got to say—I’m disappointed, Captain. I knew your history with the Red Skull might distort your perspective about the work that Hydra is doing for the world—”

Jesus Christ. Jesus _weeping Christ_ —

“—but when we found out you’d been S.R., I allowed myself some hope. I hoped that this man was a _realist_ , not afraid to get his hands dirty. Here was somebody rational enough to see the big picture.”

“There is no big picture,” Steve says, and Bucky thumbs the P30 free of his thigh holster—fumbles the gun, hand spasming and—and steadying, soft creak of metal gears cinching tight, finger landing on the trigger. Steve takes a breath—shit, he’s gotta—gotta hold eye contact with Pierce, gotta hold this fuckin’ veil together, and—

Warmth on his upper lip, and then the stink of salt and iron a second later. His fucking nose is bleeding again—he’s running on fumes.

Fuel light’s been on for the last twenty klicks, but there’s no stopping ’til the job’s done.

“There’s no big picture,” Steve repeats, tasting old pennies. “There’s a trillion, trillion little pictures, all overlapping. All connected, and depending on one another. I’m not your rational man, Pierce. I never killed civilians. I never killed kids. And I sure as Hell wouldn’t rip away free will and choice from millions of human beings. You’ve got the wrong guy.”

There is silence for—for one heartbeat, two, stretching out like razor wire at the lip of a trench, and then—

“That’s a shame,” Pierce says, and lifts the gun, smoothly shifting stance to level his aim at Steve’s face and—

And if Steve were faster, he could duck. If Steve were more powerful, he could throw up another veil, go dark. If Steve were more cunning, he’d have another distraction, another play to make—and he’s not. Not more cunning, not more powerful, not faster.

He’s got one flimsy-ass _don’t-notice-me_ veil, pinned across Bucky Barnes. He’s got just enough juice in reserve to keep his heart beating, his lungs churning. He’s bet every Goddamn thing on this one spell, this one play. This one asshole.

“Wait,” Steve blurts, idiotic, buying time, buying himself seconds, just—

Pierce stops, sighting down the gun barrel, black hole of the muzzle staring Steve in the eye. His face is twisted at the mouth and brow with contempt, lines of his press conference nobleman’s features distorted.

A heartbeat of silence, two, and then—

“You’re stalling,” Pierce says, sneering, and he shifts his body weight a half-inch, eyes darting to—to the doors, to the catwalk, like he’s expecting the cavalry, and even now it still doesn’t fuckin’ occur to him to _look down_.

He thinks the Winter Soldier is _his_. His soldier, his automaton, as invested with soul and will and mind as a Barrett M82 rifle or a fuckin’ desk chair. When Pierce was doing his Goddamn _simple equations_ for this war, he failed to factor in Bucky Barnes.

Buck’s arm coils, metal hinging up at the elbow nothin’ like a flesh-and-bone joint. His eyes are still vacant as derelict houses, half-lidded and staring up past Steve into the empty, but the gun in his hand is drawing up, wavering, aiming, and—

Steve grins, bares blood-stained teeth, wolfish.

Pierce blinks, shifts again to level the ViceStar at Steve’s centre mass, solid stance and finger curling around the trigger and—

—and there’s a _crack_ , loud as a back-handed slap to the eardrums—

—and Pierce is staggering back, crying out, pure animal flinch, recoiling from—

Bucky’s bullet—he’s come close enough to clip the cloth of Pierce’s shirt sleeve, close enough to shave the hairs from his forearm, and Pierce—he’s lurched back one step, two, undistilled stupid disbelief on his face, gaze darting from Steve and down to the Soldier and back up and—

His gun hand has drifted sideways. He’s off mark.

Steve snarls and drops his head and _moves_ and—

—and Pierce is reorienting, the ViceStar coming back up, pulling himself back to shooting stance and—

Steve lurches, almost falls, snatching at the concrete with his fingertips for purchase—Christ, his fucking thigh, the fucking _bullet_ and—

Stamps on the unturned rim of his shield with one booted foot and—

The shield turns, flips, neat as pie, neat as you fuckin’ like, and Steve is still moving forward, somethin’ like a scream falling outta his mouth because Mother Mary _Christ this hurts_ but—

Pierce levels the gun at Steve’s face.

Steve catches the strap on his shield, high point of the arc, musical chime of vibranuim over concrete bright as sunlight on water and—

Hauls the shield up, front and centre—

_Crack_ of the ViceStar firing is loud as a Goddamn thunderclap and Steve can feel the purring buzz in the metal where the round’s hit his shield and sheared off and—

And _keep moving_ and it’s a lurching crippled run, muscle and tendon in his thigh sawing away fibre by fibre against the lodged bullet—almost treads on Bucky’s shoulder, shortening his stride and then pushing off to jump over him and—

Landing on his right foot, bad leg, and it’s folding like a bad hand of cards and he’s staggering forward, falling on his fuckin’ face with pace and attitude and—

The shield is coming down, hands dropping to lower his centre of gravity as he falls, so he can see Pierce—right there, he’s _right_ the _fuck there_ , fading back another step and correcting his aim—

Alexander Pierce is no man’s fool. Started his work in national security with the CIA. He’s old and he ain’t been in the field for decades but he’s got training in there somewhere and—

He’s drawing the obvious conclusion. If Steve’s got his shield up, you aim where the shield ain’t.

He ain’t the first fella to have drawn that conclusion, in the last eighty years. Steve’s played this game once or twice, himself.

Pierce drops the gun to aim lower belly, below the curve of Steve’s shield, and—

Steve snatches one more Goddamn step from the jaws of gravity, turns the fall into a dive, throwing himself forward. Shield face first. Feet up, head down, arms inside the carriage at all times—

Another gunshot _crack_ , eardrum shattering, loud like the backdrop fabric of reality is tearing, and the muted hum sings through the metal in his hands, warmth and vibration against his fingertips and—

And then he’s down, sprawling, yelping as elbows-knees- _fucking Christ his thigh_ hit the concrete, jarring. Almost loses the shield, a couple fingers snagged through the strap his only saving grace. He’s down and—

And he’s deaf as a fuckin’ post, two gunshots at kissing-close range, soupy grey swimming at the edges of his vision. And then the stink of charred flesh and blood hits his nose and—

He’s rearing up, shaking, blinking, up onto his elbows and—

Beyond the ringing howl in his ears he can hear—

Pierce is down. His glossy dress shoes are a half-inch from Steve’s nose. He’s down and—and there’s a big fuckin’ hole through his left hip. Pelvis, lower belly—ViceStar handguns leave an entry wound bigger than a fucking grapefruit. The exit wound is gonna be—

Return to sender. His shot pinged offa Steve’s shield and came straight back at him, neat and tight as a surgical incision. Left a big Goddamn mess in its wake.

That groaning wail Steve can just hear—that’s Pierce, gritted teeth and writhing and—

He’s still got the ViceStar in his right hand.

He’s still got the Goddamn gun in his hand and the noise Steve makes is nothing like human, a rippling grind like he’s bringing gravel up his trachea, closest thing his throat can make to a snarl.

“ _Heil… Hydra_ ,” Pierce chokes out, and his gun hand is wavering, lifting—

—and Steve pushes up, lunges, shoving through both arms and his left knee, left thigh, _crang_ of the shield scrapin’ off a layer of paint on the concrete and he’s heaving himself up and forward and—

Sprawls across Pierce, shield coming bell-curve down over his right hand. Over the ViceStar.

The third gunshot is not so much a sound as it is a punch square in the face from the hand of God. It’s less’n a Goddamn foot away from Steve’s head, and vibranium will absorb the impact of the bullet itself but it ain’t doing shit about the noise and he’s blinking, shoving, bearing down over the shield with all of the puny weight in his frame, with whatever strength he’s got left.

He’s about four fuckin’ inches out from Pierce’s face. Not enough room for Jesus between ‘em. Means the spray of blood from under the shield hits Steve in the chin, the neck. Means he’s close enough to read the heartbeat of blinding agony, and then the confusion, the flickers of frustration, swimming through Pierce’s expression.

Close enough to watch the last of those flickers fade out, awareness and intent sinking, dropping away. Close enough to feel his iron-wet breath sigh out, and then—

Still. Ringing silence.

Steve has Pierce’s blood in his Goddamn teeth.

Jesus Christ Almighty, what a clusterfuck.

Steve lets go of the shield. Sits back, sagging, half-collapsed across Alexander Pierce’s fuckin’ corpse in a tangle of knees and bones. The bite of the concrete against the palms of his hands is distant as the moon. There are sparks of light behind his eyes; his ears are shrieking, ringing, a mindless hysterical howl.

He twists, pivots around the white-pain anchor point of agony in his right thigh. Plants shaking hands on the floor and starts to crawl.

He’s a sinner felled by grace, he’s a limp fuckin’ spaghetti noodle, and he’s shaking so hard he can’t feel his fuckin’ fingers. Can’t hear a Goddamn thing past screaming in his eardrums, past the surge of the world-music flooding through him, concrete-song and steel-song and the jagged lurching wail of violence and spilled blood. Past Bucky’s song, brassy trumpet notes howling over the clatter of steel and bone.

He crawls.

Bucky’s got a spatter of concrete dust glued to the sweat of his forehead, his hairline. Steve smears at it, fumbling and graceless because his hands are numbing out.

His grey eyes are still fixed, open and sightless, but—but Bucky’s in there somewhere, fighting his way out past seventy-some years of Goddamn programming. And he can hear, must be able to hear, because he’d aimed a gun sight-unseen square at Alexander fuckin’ Pierce, so—

“We got ‘im,” Steve tells him, nesting fingers into the rat’s nest of Bucky’s hair. “Sweetheart, we’re okay. It’s done. I’ve got it from here.”

Fumbles with bloodless fingertips at the comms unit at his ear, at—

“Sam,” Steve rasps. “We’re done. Pull everybody out.”

“ _Steve?_ ” comes the reply, breathless and immediate, and Steve pulls his comms unit out and shoves it in a pocket on Bucky’s tac jacket. Which is a dick move, by just about any system of measurement. But he needs to concentrate; last push before the finish line. Gotta get this done.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Fold forward—forehead to Buck’s shoulder, metal cold and smooth against his skin—and close your eyes and _go_ —

When he was in the ice, when he would—when he would dissociate, when he needed to stop being Steve-shaped for a while, he would _go wide_. Sprawl out in spirit, let himself unfurl in all directions, let himself be ice and water, the steel bones of the Valkyrie.

If he wasn’t a person, then he didn’t need to think, to feel, to remember, to mark the slow and grinding passage of time—days, weeks, years—

Steve goes _wide_ —into the concrete, into the steel beams of the walls, into glass and wood and plasterboard. Into computers and lockers and huge fuck-off machines. Into guns—HammerTech guns, crate after Goddamn crate of them in the loading bay and store rooms and loaded into trucks and—

He goes into his anchor blades.

Four of ‘em, one at each wall, at the farthest edges of the complex.

He goes into folded steel, molecules cool and sleek and razor sharp against the fabric of his soul and—

He goes into the spells. Hexes, layered and folded back on themselves like the steel, stronger and harder—and he lets them start to unfold, densely woven hexes unspooling out through him like pressurised steam given vent and—

—and the fires of unmaking pass through him, tear through him, stripping away chunks of soul like a hurricane wind tearing tiles from the rooftops, branches from the trees, and—

—and he’s distantly aware of the body at the centre of the web of his awareness, _his_ body: aware of the tacky-iron of blood gluing to his skin, from his nose, from his ears, tiny blood vessels bursting with the pressure, with the sheer fuckin’ voltage of what he’s asking his meat-suit to carry, to channel, to bear—

—and he is in the guns, in HammerTech’s guns. In Hydra’s guns.

He’s woven deep into their circuits, close as a lover, press of microscopic wires to the matter and meat of his soul.

He is close enough to hear the scream of impossibly fine wiring, surging, heating, tearing, close enough to feel that heat pressed to his soul like a brand, like a thousand brands, like a thousand-thousand—

And he can hear the roar of the hex-music, discordant and jangling. Can hear the Goddamn sweet snap and pop of circuits frying, of weapons turning into inert plastic and wire, coming from all around him—in display units in the offices upstairs; half-assembled on racks next to a couple of the machines; in crate after crate after crate, stacked against walls and loaded into trucks and—

—and then the spells are through and out, like fishing line pulling unspooled all the way outta your grasping hands and—and there’s a long heartbeat of ringing silence, empty and white as Buck’s vacant cell under Ivy City.

Steve tries to lift his head, his hands—no dice. Forces his eyes open and—grey. He’s got a whole sea of Goddamn grey, and his mouth tastes of rank copper and iron and then—

The music returns—the world music, Steve’s song and Bucky’s song, the music of concrete and dirt and sky and—it’s a tsunami, it’s the shockwave off a nuke, and Steve can distantly feel his heart squeezing and spasming in his chest, and he’sgot a half-second to think this is gotta be what it’s like if you piss off God enough to make Him raise His voice and then—

—black.


	20. Chapter 20

Later, Steve learns—

Later there’s cable news. There are debriefs and blog posts, investigative articles sprawled across newsprint. _Time_ magazine gives the story a whole issue, all sixty-some pages—after they get their Goddamn house in order, anyway, hire and fire a few folks, since it turned out one of their editors was Hydra, or being coerced by Hydra, or—anyway—

Later Steve learns that—when Buck pulled the trigger in that factory, and then Pierce, _one_ -two-three-four cracks of gunfire and—

At the time Steve felt like it was sprawled out over hours, days, but in real time it was maybe ten seconds flat and—and it was _quiet_ , it was so damn quiet outside. The tanks were lined up on the street, Army grunts forming up, and BAST cut the music, cut the light show, cut all the noise and chaos that had covered up the shooting and screaming and God knows what that’d come before and—

The music stopped. There was the awful grind and creak of treads, Abrams tanks churning slowly up the pavemented street. There were voices, BAST organisers calling instruction and directing the flow of questions, of bodies, evacuating the vulnerable folks that needed out, that needed gone, sending them to the streets behind the complex, away from the tanks, the cops, the lines of rifles and—

And there were a thousand more protesters who stayed. Who were forming up, linking arms—or hands on shoulders, hand in hand, organic and dynamic and fluid as water—and turning their faces to the street.

To the convoy of Army transports, spilling soldiers. To the tanks. To the watching eyes of the world, news cameras and helicopters and—

So it’s quiet, is the thing. There’s movement and voices and the grumble of engines, but beyond that it’s quiet, like the whole Goddam world is holding its breath.

And then a gunshot rings out, and— _two, three, four_ —

And then it all goes FUBAR.

*******

The first thing Steve knows is the shrieking wail of a quinjet’s engines and the tacky tug of drying blood glueing his eyelashes together and—

Steve turns his head, wets his lips, opens his eyes a crack—grey, blurred, all smears of light and dark.

He’s—he’s _tied up_ , he’s—ahh, fuck, _they’ve got him_ , Hydra must have—no. No, wait, he’s—

His hands are free. He’s strapped at the hips and across the chest, laid down in—

He’s in a quinjet. Laid down in the back, strapped up like luggage, but not restrained. That shudder rattling up through his spine and skull and pelvis, the howl of the engines singing—they’re in the air. Steve and—and whoever the fuck is flying this thing.

Jesus Christ, what happened?

*******

Later, there’s the footage from New York—shaky cellphone footage in the dark of the Lincoln Tunnel, distorted by the wavering firelight from Tony Stark’s burning Maserati, sprawling side-on across a couple lanes, and—

—and the HammerTech logo stands out on the side of the truck. You can just make out the dark shape moving low and liquid as an oil slick on the roof of the truck’s cab, and then the driver’s door opens and the mook inside is swinging out, ViceStar handgun coming up and—

—and the dark shape is spilling from atop the cab and landing on ‘im, riding him down to the ground and—and you can catch limbs, arms and legs and the pale blur of a triangle of bare skin, the mouth and jawline stark white against the black of his suit and mask and—

—and the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen rolls with the fall, one hand snatching at the collar of the mook’s tac jacket and reefing—momentum and—and slamming the guy face-first into the road and—

—and there’s another three squids rounding the truck, coming up from the rear, rifles up and—and the Devil shoves up, jack-knifes forward and up through the open door into the cab of the truck and—and then one of the agents is falling, gun spilling from his hands and sagging, legs boneless and—

The second agent falls. The third drops a couple seconds later, turning frantically, trying to get a bead on the threat.

It’s dark, and the footage is shit. Shaky, blurred. You can only just make out the arrows sticking out of their necks.

*******

Steve maybe—he maybe loses time, blacks out again, because—because the next thing he knows is the mechanical roar of the quinjet’s engines but—at a lower pitch, now, throbbing steady. Cruising altitude.

He can see some, now—the metal mesh of the shelving rack far overhead. The gradient shading, darkest to brightest up at the front of the jet, where the cockpit windows flood in sunlight from outside. Everything is still blurred to fuck, and—off, somehow. Asymmetrical, in some kinda way he can’t put his finger on.

His head hurts like a fuckin’ pimple squeezed between God’s thumbnails. Christ, his everything hurts, down to the cells. Channel of power that runs from root to crown is one long blazing ache like he’s been running molten lead through it.

Last thing he remembers is—the factory. He was in the factory, and he’d hexed all of Hydra’s toys into expensive paperweights and then flaked out like the damsel in need of rescuing and—and then—and now he’s—

Christ, where is he?

Steve wets his lips again, closes his useless Goddamn eyes and—if he’s captive, if Hydra have him, then he’s gotta— _think_ , man. Shit’s sake, think.

He can—he can’t see shit. Can’t hear nothin’ past the shriek of the jet’s engines, a couple sheets of metal and all of three feet away from his head. He can—he can _listen_ , can use his Goddamn head for more’n holding up a stupid haircut and—

He’s hearing quinjet song, pounding and martial and mechanical. Hearing sky song and wind song, cloud song, fluid and twisting and breathlessly light. He’s hearing—

Grind of steel on steel, wheels moaning against train tracks. Steel on bone, saw teeth, biting. Brass trumpets, distorted like they’re echoing from somewhere impossibly distant.

“Bucky?” Steve rasps.

*******

Later comes the internet fallout, the hashtags— _#SHIELDRA_ and _#HydraSpill_ and _#datadump_ and—

—and there’s the leaked footage from a security camera in the Triskelion. High-angle shot of Natasha Romanoff in her Widow tac suit, stalking up a corridor like a storm front rolling over the horizon, Glock in each hand and a look of total concentration on her face and a smear of blood up the side of her neck and—

Behind her comes the sarcophagus, smooth silvery metal featureless on the outside, hovering four feet above the ground, micro repulsors like pallbearers carrying Nick Fury and his tubes and wires and whatever medical equipment is keeping him alive, onward. Maria Hill brings up the rear, one hand to her earpiece, mouth moving fast, talking, explaining or asking a question or—

Movement at the end of the corridor, some agent rounding the corner, vest under a suit jacket and gun coming up and—and Hill pivots in mid-stride, ICER gun in her second hand, turning and firing in one smooth movement.

Flash of blue and the agent pitches over, rigid as a Michelangelo in marble, and Hill’s turned back again before he even hits the floor, ground-eating stride forward like a steamroller and—

And then Natasha lifts a Glock and there’s a point-nothin’ of a second glimpse of the round mouth of the gun muzzle staring up at the camera, before the feed cuts to static.

*******

The bone saw and steel song, the Soldier’s song—hiccups, for half a second. There’s no other response, for maybe a heartbeat, and then comes the dysrhythmic clump of boots on the metal of the jet floor and a black shape eclipses Steve’s field of Impressionist blurs. Steve blinks furiously, like he can make his tragically shit eyes adjust if he wills it hard enough.

Buckles, straps, zippers against charcoal grey Kevlar—Clint’s spare tac jacket over tatty fuckin’ second-hand jeans and—and then Bucky goes to his knees, with a crunch like someone’s dropped a sack of cement into a pile of loose engine parts. Steve can see the pale blur of his face, the dark haze of beard and hollowed eyes, smear of pink for his mouth.

“Bucky,” Steve says again, clearer this time.

He can hear his own song, Buck’s music. Nothin’ else like a human song, nothin’ else with—soul, personality, with that integral element of urgency that comes from living beings with a pulse and a resp rate. They’re alone on this quinjet.

Means they got away clean. Somehow.

Thank Christ. Thank fuckin’ Christ.

“You okay?” Steve asks, slurring some. “We okay?”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Bucky replies, low and worn at the edges like a prayer without hope, and then, “M’functional. Don’t need maintenance. You need a medic.”

“Too much blood,” Steve says, staring, trying to make sense of—everything looks flatter than it oughta be, somehow, and it’s still like he’s looking through glass smeared with Vaseline, but he can see the smears of drying crimson across the front of Buck’s tac jacket, gumming up the fine gaps between the plates of his metal arm. “You’re hurt, _a stór_.”

“That’s your blood, you fuckin’ putz,” Bucky answers. “You bled outta your fuckin’ ears. You need a Goddamn medic.”

The Hell with that. Steve ain’t dead yet, which means whatever’s wrong with him ain’t killing him in any kinda hurry. What he needs is about ten hours of sleep, and then to shift shape a couple times so his body resets to baseline, and then about another sixteen hours of sleep.

But—but _priorities_ —“Did the protesters get out? Where’s Sam?”

“Radio silent,” Buck says, reaching over and smoothing his right palm over Steve’s forehead, and it’s almost an affectionate gesture except for how he follows it up with a pen torch, left hand, flicking light into both eyes. Checking Steve’s pupils. Steve flinches, bites back the wolfish urge to snarl.

“Went dark an hour ago. Protesters are pulling out of Detroit. I can’t find any reports of casualties, but these newscaster fucks don’t know nothin’ about nothin’.”

He’s peering closely at Steve’s eyes, gaze darting from one side to—“I don’t have a head injury,” Steve says.

“What the Hell would you know?” Bucky answers.

Which is—not an unfair call, given Steve’s history of poor decision-making. “We got news reports?” Steve asks—he needs intel, needs to know what the Hell is going on—“Nothing on comms?”

Bucky uncoils, stands up, crosses the jet and grabs—it’s the screen for mission briefings, mounted up top. Swings it around and taps at the screen with a human fingertip until it’s showing—cable news, a couple different channels, the screen split down the middle.

Steve can make out—there’s people running, and something is on fire, but his lousy Goddamn eyesight means he can’t read the news-ticker headlines at the bottom of the screen and—

And he’s gotta turn his head all the way to the right, if he wants to see it. Gotta bring his left eye into the field of play, because the right—the right is—

“Steve,” Bucky says, and he’s standing next to the monitor, lookin’ over at Steve like how he’d looked the day they found the litter of kittens dead in their milk crate behind the dressmaker’s shop on Cumberland Street. “Your right eye.”

“I know, Buck,” Steve says, tight, because he can’t—he can’t fuckin’—and his mouth is twitching like he’s gonna mewl or something so he bites down on the inside of his cheek, hard, and then, again: “Can we raise anybody on comms?”

They can’t raise nobody on comms—which is about what Steve was expecting. If they’d figured he was captured or compromised inside the factory, then Tony woulda remotely fried his link back to the comms channel. Burned him, protected everybody else—that was the protocol they’d agreed to before zero-hour.

So he’s Goddamn glad that his comms earwig is dead—but it means they’re relying on cable fuckin’ news for intel. Relying on the flurries of garbled conversation happening through SHIELD’s emergency channels—they can listen in through the quinjet’s uplink—

—which is how Steve learns that Natasha and Hill made it into the heart of the Triskelion, have dumped SHIELD’s secured files to the internet.

Chatter on SHIELD channels is a Goddamn mess—there’s folks requesting backup, firefights happening in bases across the globe—on carriers, in fuckin’ planes, Hydra personnel turning on the agents next to ‘em and—there’s embedded SHIELD agents, their covers comprehensively blown by the leak, requesting urgent extraction in Prague and Johannesburg and Pyongyang.

There are people denouncing Natasha Romanoff as a red traitor. There are agents accusing each other of being Hydra plants spreading disinformation. It’s a clusterfuck.

Cable news ain’t any more coherent. Most recent footage from Detroit, from the HammerTech factory, is showing the tanks still on site, but—not manned, not aiming anyplace, just blocking the damn road—so the cop cars and ambulances have had to mount the footpath, and someone’s mown down the chain link fence to create another entry point to the site, open up the bottleneck.

The place is crawling with Army and cops and paramedics but—no BAST. The protesters are gone.

Sam is gone. Trip, Naveen, Nadya—they’re dead or scattered or—whatever the Hell happened there, it’s over and done with. Happened while Steve was still staring at the inside of his eyelids, out like a light.

Time is oh-nine-twenty-two. So Steve’s missing an hour and change. Plenty enough time for the world to change, for a pitched battle to turn into a rout, for—

Fuck. _Holy Mary, Mother of God_ , let them be safe—please, Jesus Christ on a bike _let them be safe_ —

“Buck,” Steve says, and it’s the first thing either of ‘em has said in a while, and his voice comes tight because he’s strangling the urge to howl—the seeking howl, when you’re separated from your pack—“Where are we?”

Bucky shifts his stance—he’s leaning against the back of the pilot’s seat, arms crossed—hauls his gaze away from the newsfeed on screen. “Cloaked, forty thousand feet above Ontario. Doing three-hundred klick circles. We got someplace to be?”

Need to get back inside the circuit, need to find out what the Hell is going on—“New York,” Steve says. “Take us to Stark Tower.”

*******

The welcome wagon over Park Avenue looks like thirty Stark Industries security fellas scrambling to the helipad on the flight deck of the Tower, with better’n military-grade bulletproof fibre suits and submachine guns.

“ _SHIELD Jet 826 Bravo,_ ” comes spitting from the radio, from every speaker in the jet, blaring louder than God, all crisp-edged British accent. “ _Be advised, we have satellite lock to your electronic signature. You have ten seconds to correct course away from the Tower. Mr Stark is not receiving guests._ ”

“JARVIS!” Steve yelps, and flails for a couple seconds like he’s gonna get up—only he’s still belted down across the hips, and just trying to sit up makes his head reel and sends a jolt of pain from temple to temple like someone’s pushed a railroad spike through his skull and—and then Bucky’s there, shoving the pilot’s headset into Steve’s hands. Steve fumbles, blinking, finding the mike by touch—“JARVIS, it’s me. It’s Steve.”

There’s a second of silence—which is about as close as JARVIS ever comes to betraying surprise; he’ll be running voice recognition or—and then: “ _Captain Rogers. I see your obituary writers were somewhat premature_.”

“I like keeping ‘em on their toes,” Steve replies.

Buck’s gotta half-carry Steve off the jet, knees soft as overcooked spaghetti noodles and—and there is a yawning ocean of smeary grey across the right half of his visual field, across the right half of the world. Everything feels off-centre, cock-angled, like he doesn’t know where his feet are gonna land.

They lurch to the bottom of the ramp, as far as where the metal kisses tarmac, and they’re in the middle of a rough circle of security guys, and—

“Hold for positive ID,” someone calls, so—so they hold.

Buck’s on Steve’s left; his human arm around Steve’s ribcage is rigid as concrete, hard enough to bruise yourself against.

Silence drops, waiting. The guards are holding their guns loosely, across their bodies, not aiming anyplace in particular, but—holding ‘em, watching. Waiting.

The milky sunlight filtering through the clouds overhead is cold, corpse-pale. Steve can feel the hairs on his spine trying to bristle, non-existent hackles bunching up.

Can hear the rasping mechanical whine of Bucky’s weapon arm recalibrating its plates. One of the security guys shifts, staring.

And then—and then the black-suited wall parts and—

It’s Clint, prowling through, bow at his back and his tac suit misted with concrete dust, stripes of sweat and dirt worn into the lines on his forehead, in the corners of his eyes.

“Hey,” Clint says, casual like they’re bumping into each other at the fuckin’ gym, and—

“Jesus Christ,” Steve answers, breathless—

“I still answer to Barton,” Clint says—he’s looking them over, Steve and Buck, eyes darting, studying. “Hawkeye, if we’re feeling formal. I gotta—” and his hands come up, fingers flexing and opening. “Gotta check you for photostatic veils, or wizard shit.”

Steve blinks, straightens his spine like he’s presenting his face on a pedestal, and Clint pats his cheeks, presses blunt thumbs alongside Steve’s crooked nose. Steve can feel the calluses from his bowstring, can smell his sweat and—

This is real. Clint’s here and he’s alive and this is _real_ —

“Sitrep,” Steve croaks, blinking hard, and he’s looking Clint in the eye, no veils and no bullshit and being seen. Clint is looking back, muddy blue-green of his eyes from a couple feet away, weighing, measuring, like he’s seeing Steve down to the basement level of his soul.

“Clint. You gotta tell me what happened. You gotta tell me they’re okay.”

Clint stares for another heartbeat, two, and then he cracks the finest edge of a smile, cuffs Steve fondly across the ear with one hand, reaches over with the other hand to rap his knuckles on Buck’s metal shoulder. Like he’s knocking on a bunker door.

Nods and smiles for real and steps back, hand going up to the comms piece in his ear. “Stark? We’re good. They’re the genuine article.”

And then all the security guys are moving at once, milling around and pivoting to head back inside and circling around the jet, the weight of all that attention drawn away.

Bucky breathes out, that arm around Steve’s ribs shifting from concrete back to flesh, and Steve’s head spins hard and fast, the watery light of day bright as phosphorus burning against his brainpan.

“We’re good,” Clint says again, and Steve closes his fucked eyes and chokes back a sob.

*******

This is the sitrep: somehow, against all the odds, against common sense and the laws of fuckin’ nature—somehow, the stupid Goddamn plan worked.

Clint gives them the bullet points in the lift down from the flight deck—

New York is under control: Clint and the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen stopped Hydra’s trucks in the Lincoln tunnel, held ‘em there long enough for the cops to come—the not-Hydra cops, the real cops, because it turns out Matt knows a guy who knows a guy who’s a police sergeant, solid guy with clean hands on the 15th Precinct, and the second he’d got off the phone with Steve, Matt’d yanked on that string real hard.

“Were you ever gonna tell me you know the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen?” Clint asks, scarred hands flexing against the lift railing. “Or was I just meant to find out when he showed up with his rope knuckledusters and can-do attitude?”

“Rope knuckledusters?” Steve answers, and—

“I have the biggest professional crush,” Clint says, and—

Sam is okay, BAST is okay.

The demonstration at Detroit turned into a shitshow, and it shook out that at least some of those Army guys were being Hydra brain-zap mind controlled but—

But there were only ever a dozen shots fired, live rounds.

Worst injury outta the whole clusterfuck was one of the Army grunts, through-and-through friendly-fire shot in the gut when one of their bullets ricocheted off Sam’s wing. He’ll need surgery. There are a couple broken ankles, a dislocated shoulder, a half-dozen head injuries, but other’n that—

Other than that, they’ve come through the fire intact. Thank Christ, thank _Christ_ —

BAST have scattered and gone to ground; Sam has gone to ground, last heard from en route to his Mama’s house—but he’s checking in regular and he’s not hurt and he’s okay, he’s okay.

And Natasha—Natasha has gone dark, radio silent, and—

—and SHIELD’s secured files are trending on Twitter, so she and Hill musta made it through the Triskelion, into the belly of the beast. Musta got Steve’s manufactured eyeball, slightly pre-loved, to work at the biometric access terminal.

And SHIELD is—

“Haemorrhaging,” Clint says. “It’s a shit-fight. I mean we knew Hydra was in everything, but—it’s bad in there. I don’t—”

Clint breaks off, mouth working like he’s turning over the phrases in his head, and then: “Fury is down. Hill’s radio silent. Coulson is dead. Nat… It’s open war in bases all over the world, and no one is stepping up to lead, offer some kinda way forward.”

Steve closes his eyes, breathes out—Christ knows how many operatives have been killed in the last couple hours. Not even Hydra plants—SHIELD agents, good agents, folks who signed up with every Goddamn intention of making the world a safer place.

He’d showered Pierce with shit for his big ideas about sacrificing people for the greater good, but—but this was always gonna be the outcome of exposing Hydra, dragging them into the light.

There was no way to cleanly cauterise this wound.

“I’m sorry, Clint.”

Clint heaves his shoulders, shifts his crossed arms, somethin’ like a shrug, staring fixed into the powdered metal of the lift wall. “Had to happen, right?”

There’s silence—drooling out slow, one heartbeat, two, three—and then the lift slows and stops, door sliding open.

White and glass and steely silver metal, glossy black seamless floor underfoot. Tony’s aesthetic is the kinda minimalism you can only achieve with millions of dollars and acres of un-lived-in space.

This floor is Tony’s private workshop, design and manufacture, the place the magic happens; Steve’s spent hours up here, just happening to be in the neighbourhood, back when he lived in New York, when he was courting Stark and his weapons and his brain.

Clint prowls outta the lift and hooks right, and Steve and Bucky limp after him—Buck’s still gotta prop him up, take the weight from his legs so Steve doesn’t fold like a bad hand of cards. _I’ll be the gas, but you’ve gotta steer_ —Christ, that was only about a million years ago, and chances are Steve’s the only one who remembers it now, the day he and Buck first met, snot-nosed kids in short pants—

Across the foyer and the glass doors slide open to greet them, through and into the main workshop and—Steve’s gotta blink, squint, wait for his eyes—his _eye_ —to adjust; everything is bright, gleaming, light and colour and movement.

Tony is lying cock-angled on a fold-out sofa, one arm folded under his head and the other outstretched, baring the IV line running into his left bicep. The drip is hanging above his head—small bag of fluid, brightly-coloured label—so some kinda medication, maybe antibiotics or a painkiller.

He’s looking exhausted—bags under his eyes deep enough to carry all of his issues and Steve’s combined. Pale, the edges of his beard starting to blur, dark sweat circles on his grey T-shirt. But he’s awake, alert, his gaze focused on the holographic wall of projected data—it’s three or four different cable news channels, transmissions from SHIELD’s emergency channels. It’s Twitter. It’s JARVIS, running analysis, trying to pull intelligence out of the raw data. It’s—

Sam, in one of the newsfeeds, standing with—he’s standing in front of the BAST line, putting himself in front of the protesters, and—

—and there’s a fistful of Army grunts facing off, rifles up. A couple of ‘em are wavering, lowering their weapons, like whatever has put them here—Hydra brain fuck or just plain orders—it ain’t enough to force them to fire on civilians but—

But two of them aren’t faltering, guns up and aiming and—and Steve can see Sam’s mouth moving, talking fast and then—and then he’s turning, parade ground neat pivot in place, and his wings are coming up, flaring wide, and—

Two soldiers fire. Sam staggers—

“Jesus _fuck_ ,” Steve blurts, and if Buck weren’t holding him up he’da gone to his knees, and—

“He’s okay,” Clint says again.

“Gotta build that suit with more armouring across the central unit, if he’s gonna use it like that,” Tony says, musing, left hand flexing like he’s already started the redesign in his head, and—

Onscreen, Sam is—the bullets shear off the scuffed metal of his wings. He lurches forward a couple steps, thrown by the impact, and then—he’s using his wings to steady himself, thoughtless as breathing, and he’s looking back over his shoulder. Looking front to the protesters, mouth moving again, checking in, making sure everybody’s okay—they’re shaken, hanging onto each other, but not Goddamn goin’ nowhere and—

Christ on a crutch. Mother Mary—Saint Sebastian, _Holy Commander at the Roman Emperor’s court_ —

“Holy shit,” Tony blurts, and Steve tears his eyes away from the feed to look at Tony, who is—

Staring at him. Staring straight at him.

Oh—fuck, that’s right.

Steve’s only ever talking to Tony with his Cap-face on—either shapeshifted or wearing a seeming across his real features.

Even after Tony found out he’s a sorcerer and a fraud, Steve had still kept up the Cap-face facade because—because he’d needed Tony’s trust, and because it’s fuckin’ a lot to take in, the alien eyes and the scars and the fangs and—

“I mean I was warned, but holy shit,” Tony is saying. “I’m putting in a complaint, on behalf of physics. Where does all the extra mass come from?”

“I—” Steve has gotta stop, breathe; he’s light-headed, all the sudden, the lurch and heave of his gut at—

He’d been ready for revulsion, for horror and—and Tony is just seeing a scientific puzzle. Of course he is.

The extra mass—how in the Hell to even begin explaining? Ulfadhir did talk him through this, seventy-some years ago, but Steve can still only just grasp at the answers with his fingertips.

“Uh. The, uh, the universal constants. They’re not actually constant, if you ask nice enough.”

“The constants aren’t constant,” Tony repeats, slow like he’s reflecting on every nuance of the words, rolling his head back to watch the holographic feed.

Clint is sloping over to one of the work benches, parking his ass on a stool and unclipping his quiver and bow from the rig across his shoulder. Bucky hauls Steve into motion again, parks him in a desk chair like he’s dumping a piece of broken luggage, falls back into place just behind Steve like—like he’s fallen back into some kinda bodyguard role again.

On the feed, Clint is standing on top of a low-slung car in the murky half-light of the Lincoln Tunnel, smoothly nocking and firing arrows into the dark. In another window, BAST protesters are retreating across the HammerTech factory car park, cells of seven sticking close together—as per the protocol, as per their drills, no one falling behind.

“What do you mean? _If you ask nice enough_?” Tony has his head up again, fascination badly hidden in the lines of his features. “Who are you asking? _God_?”

“No, I—everything. You’re asking everything. Like, my cells and tissue. The atoms that are me. I’m asking them. They’ve all got soul and their own ideas about how things oughta be, I’m persuading them.”

Tony blinks hard a couple of times. “You—wow. Everything has soul? That is—very sage-burning hippie green juice of you. I thought you were Catholic?”

“Everything is compatible with Catholicism if you say enough _Ave Maria_ s,” Steve says, absently, turning so he can look with his left eye—Bucky is standing a couple feet back from Steve’s chair, at-ease stance. He’s still got the faint brown specks of Pierce’s dried blood dotted across his face.

“Buck. You can sit down.”

Bucky—blinks, shakes his head, just slightly, like he’s shaking off a fly or somethin’.

Doesn’t meet Steve’s gaze—he’s watching entrances, exits. Maybe it’s this place, or—or just the fuck-awful kinda day they’re having, but he’s—gone deep into one Soldier protocol or another.

And Steve could _order_ him to sit, but—but if this is helping him feel anchored, feel like he’s got some measure of control, and Steve strips that away from him just because it’s socially fuckin’ awkward to have him standing there—

Christ, but Steve’s so outta his depth you might as well ask a fish to work calculus.

He turns back to the room, to the feeds, to—Clint and Tony are both watching him, watching them, studying. Tony’s expression is—he’s back to the poorly disguised fascination, blended with… a tincture of nausea, of fear. Steve wonders how much Natasha has told him, how much Clint has told him.

Tony grew up on Howling Commando stories from Howard Stark, for better and for worse. He woulda had an image of Sergeant JB Barnes in his head, same as he had an image of Captain America.

Howard’s version of Captain America. The one without the side job as a spy and wet works operative, and the secret stash of ladies’ makeup in his trunk.

And then Clint clears his throat and—“You gonna tell us what happened in that factory?”

And Steve closes his eyes and just—he just _breathes_ , for a second, breathes through this Goddamn cocktail of—exhaustion, and relief, and heartache and pain and gratitude and—

Opens his eyes and starts talking.

*******

There’s the debrief, talking until Steve’s voice comes thin and frayed as his winter coat circa 1935.

There’s the questions, and answers, and Clint and Tony telling their pieces of the story, filling in the blanks and—

—and all the while the newsfeed plays, screeds of data streaming past as JARVIS tears through Hydra’s files and pulls at every thread, and the cable news channels play the same chunks of footage over and over and talking heads pontificate about what the Hell the American people oughta do now and—

And in a billion-point web of holographic light, spun across the width of Tony’s lab, Matt Murdock ducks under the barrel of a submachine gun, shifts stance and comes back up with one knee stabbing like a blade for the Hydra agent’s gut. Natasha smiles, a quirk of her lips as cold and precise as a scalpel, and tips a regal nod at the Triskelion’s security camera right before the footage drops to black. Sam is—

Sam is hands up, palms open, his wings half-furled like—he’s presenting small, harmless, but not dropping his guard, not all the way, and—and the Army grunt he’s easing his way up to is shaking, dark sweat marking the collar of his shirt under the vest.

Kid looks—Latino, maybe, or—dark hair buzzed short and he’s trembling so hard his gun hand is all over the place, his M9 wavering like—like he’s trying to aim up, steady up, point that gun at Sam’s centre mass, trying just as hard to point that gun _away_ and—

“ _I know you don’t want to hurt me_ ,” Sam is saying—can just hear him past the background roar, voices shouting and tank engines groaning away and car horns blaring and—“ _I know you don’t wanna hurt anybody here, brother. Gotta be loud inside your head right now, am I right? But you’re not gonna let Hydra use you like this—_ ”

The kid groans like someone’s twisting a knife in his gut and drops the gun, one convulsive spasm of his hand and forearm like he’s touched a live wire, and then he’s got his head in his hands and Sam is there, wings folding forward to form a curtain as he steps up, and he’s putting a hand on the kid’s shoulder, on the back of his shaved head, leaning close to speak again, too low and close for the camera crew to catch it.

“Ever get the feeling you’re watching some guy’s superhero origin story?” Clint murmurs, and Tony hums agreement—he’s finished up with the IV drip by now, disconnected and is lying on his side, so you can see the white of surgical dressings down the front of his T-shirt, and—

“Steve,” someone is saying, and he jolts—

“Shit,” Steve slurs. He’s fading, was close to passing out even sitting bolt upright. Should probably do some body things—eat, or sleep, or something—

Bucky’s there, again, fingers of his human hand biting into Steve’s jaw and hauling up so—he’s got the pen torch again, checking Steve’s pupils, brisk and practiced like he’s done a stint as a neurosurgeon sometime in the last seventy years. Only—only it’s a good bet he learned this because it was done to him: because they’d needed to check the damage done, after putting electricity through his Goddamn brainpan, again and again over the course of decades, and—

“He okay?” Clint is asking, and—

“Not a brain bleed,” Bucky answers, flat as an ironing board.

“Uh, hello? Why is _brain bleed_ even an option?” Tony calls from the fold-out, his voice ticked up about a half-register from his usual pitch, and—

They want to do scans—

Tony’s got an MRI and CT scanning equipment set up a couple floors down, had it all installed while he was planning the operation to remove his arc reactor.

They want to call in medics and study the vacant tomb of inside Steve’s skull and turn the whole Goddamn thing into a three-ring circus, and Steve’s gotta plant himself with all the stubborn cuss that is in his nature to tell ‘em _no_ , convince ‘em—

“I’m tired, okay?” Steve looks over to where Clint has been feeling for the pulse at his wrist, twists his arm to get free. “I’ve got a flat battery. Used all my charge fighting Nazis. I don’t need scanning, I need sixteen hours of sleep and a large pan pizza.”

And then to shapeshift a few times, let his body heal up. Dig the bullet out of his thigh. Get his—get his right fuckin’ eye back online—he ain’t told Clint and Tony those minor details, isn’t about to tell them. “I’ll be jake. This ain’t my first rodeo.”

The ride in the lift is a blur—it turns out Tony’s got rooms set up and ready for them right here in the Tower, only a few floors away—

—and afterwards Steve remembers the muted silver gleam of the metal wall, the press of a zipper on Clint’s tac jacket against Steve’s rib cage—Clint’s propping him up, now, and Buck’s taken point like he’s expecting ambush any damn minute now and—and the stink of ‘em all in that closed space, smoke and sweat and blood and cordite.

“He’s dead on his feet,” Clint rumbles, shifting so a different strap on his suit is digging into Steve’s side. “We could poke him through the MRI right now, like a microwave burrito, and he wouldn’t even notice—”

—and Steve is so close to blacking out he’s hanging onto the edge of the world by his teeth but he’s still got it in him to feel a little adrenal kick at—at the _idea_ of that, of waking in a dark metal tube, shoulder-tight press wrapped around every side and no way out—

“I will _break the machine with my brain_ , I swear to Christ,” Steve slurs like a drunk, and then—

Out of the lift and—and he’s catching impressions of white walls, of splashes of colour, blurred to smears, reds and coppers and—and there’s carpet underfoot, muting sound, and then—

And then there’s a bed under him, thousand thread-count sheets soft as butter and he’s distantly aware that he’s fuckin’ filthy, blood and sweat and God only knows what else, aware that he’s still got his boots on and—

“Buck?” Steve rasps, turning his head so he can use the un-fucked eye, and sees the smeary black shape of him move against the sea of white walls, white sheets, white floors.

“Here,” Bucky says, and—okay. Here. Safe.

Steve lets go.

*******

When Steve wakes up next, it’s—

“ _Captain Rogers_ ,” comes a voice outta nowhere, outta everywhere, and Steve is heaving up and off the bed before he’s awake enough to even—

—roar of pain up his leg and into his pelvis from the lodged bullet and his knee gives, lurching against the wall to keep from falling.

Disembodied voice, empty room, British accent—JARVIS. “ _There is a situation in the reception area._ ”

Mary, Mother of God. Steve grits his teeth and limps, hauls his carcass forward, steadying hands on the wall, on the bed, on the doorframe—

“Whoa, buddy, hey. It’s okay, we’re all okay here.”

A voice, coming from—and Buck is standing across the—it’s an open-plan kinda living space, low-slung sofas and side tables and a wall of bookshelves, white on white on white and—and Buck’s tucked in a doorway leading into what looks like a powder room, just his weapon arm and a gun and a sliver of his head popped around the corner so he can aim at—

It’s Happy Hogan, Tony’s security fella, stood like he’s just come in through the front foyer, hands up and palms open and looking cool as a cucumber. Like being held at gunpoint by a half-robot assassin ain’t even a bad day at work.

“I’m not armed. Not any kinda threat. I just need to talk to Rogers.”

“Stand down, Buck,” Steve rasps, sagging into a lean against the doorframe, and—and Bucky puts up the gun, clicks the safety on, loosens out from his ready stance like a marble statue softening to flesh, doesn’t take his eyes off Hogan. And Hogan twitches, looks over to Steve—

“Jesus Christ, you’re tiny,” he says.

“ _Yemu nuzhno otdokhnut’_ ,” Bucky mutters, finger hovering over the guard like he’s thinking about shooting Hogan somewhere non-essential just on principle, and—

“Buck,” Steve starts—

“Phone call,” Hogan says to Steve, on task and brisk as an early Spring day. He’s striding forward and fishing in a jacket pocket, pulling out a cell phone. “Secured line. Boss figured you’d want to take this yourself.”

Cell phone—must be—maybe Tony’s still cleaning house, finding out how Hydra got past JARVIS, got into his systems. Hogan is thumbing the screen to switch it on, passing it over, and there’s a half-second of whirling animation on screen while the program boots up, and then—

“ _Steve Rogers. You look about as good as I feel._ ” And it’s—dark skin and dark eyes, that gap-toothed smile flashing and—

It’s Sam, and it’s Sam alive and well, looking exhausted and he’s got a black eye but he’s alive, free, smiling, and Steve is distantly aware that he’s making a noise like a kicked pup, aware of going to his knees on the sleek pale hardwood floor, his fingers clawed convulsively tight around the phone.

*******

After he talks to Sam—

—and they talk for the better part of an hour, piecing together what happened inside the factory, outside the factory. The Army and the cops and BAST and Pierce, the barbershop quartet of gunshots that turned a standoff into a clusterfuck, two-parts running retreat and one-part pitched battle and—

And Sam is laying low in the basement of his Mama’s house. There’s a fold-out sofa and a mini fridge and—and he’s not _wanted_ , not by the law, or not fuckin’ yet anyway—everyone is still reeling, catching up, and with SHIELD going down like a lead balloon it ain’t clear who even has the authority of law on their side right now.

The world is a Goddamn mess right this second, and no one is sure where to point the blame, and Sam’s stupid-noble face is on every cable news channel, talking down brainwashed Army grunts and putting his body and wings between cops and protesters and—

After they talk and Steve puts down the phone and just—just puts his head in his hands and breathes for a couple minutes, works through one of his centring exercises until his hands have stopped shaking.

It’s five in the afternoon—means he got about five hours of shut eye. So he’s only in—what, about thirty hours of sleep debt now. Almost good as a store-bought one.

Uses the arm of the sofa to lever his way up, onto his feet—he’s in the living area of Tony’s apartment, all sleek white and silver surfaces and—he’s gotta squint for a minute to make sense of it, of—the far wall is all windows, looks like, floor to ceiling, and sometime in the last five hours Buck has taken down every piece of art from the walls and stacked ‘em to cover the glass.

Hide them away from the world—sight lines, snipers.

Means now Steve is looking at his own dumb face, reproduced a dozen times—the art seems to have been mostly reproductions of his War era posters, film posters and comic inserts and bond sale tours and—

“Jesus wept,” Steve says, and turns away to go find Buck.

He finds Bucky in the kitchen, sitting knees up on the floor with his back to the cabinets, a spoon in his human hand and a pint of ice cream in his weapon hand. There’s a couple empty plastic tubs next to him—instant food, some kinda, like those single-serves cups of rice—and what looks like the wrappings from a stick of butter next to that.

“Buck,” Steve starts, and then stops because he’s gotta process this for half a second. Clint’s HK P30 is on the tile next to the empty rice tubs, and there are a couple knives laid next to that like a particularly fucked up place setting.

Steve turns his head to look and—yeah, there’s a big mirror—musta come out of one of the bedrooms—propped against the far wall, across the living area. Angled so Bucky can see the front door from the kitchen floor.

He’s not stood down, not lowering his guard for one second—and he’s gotta be just as short on rest as Steve is.

One slow-burning trash fire at a time—“We can get some real food up, if you’re hungry,” Steve offers.

Bucky stares at him for a couple seconds, spoon poised halfway between the tub and his mouth. “This is… food.”

Which—makes sense, given Hydra probably weren’t big on sit-down home-cooked dinners for their wind-up hitman. Ready to eat calories from a plastic tub is probably about what Bucky’s used to.

Or—or maybe Steve’s reading too deep into this and Bucky really just fuckin’ wants to eat butter by the stick and plain rice and ice cream.

Jesus Horatio Christ on a cracker. Steve needs an instruction manual for this shit.

“Okay,” he says, raps his knuckles on the doorframe, and then—

Next thing. Next up he’s gotta—leaning against the wall and limping, cussing under his breath with every step—gotta get someplace tiled, someplace watertight, because this is gonna be messy.

Into the bathroom and close the door, take a deep fuckin’ breath and—

He’s gotta shift shape three times—squeezing and shoving at the meat of his thigh, folded-over washcloth between his teeth to keep from screaming—before the bullet pops out.

Gotta stand leaning against the sink, head nested in his arms, shaking and sweating and breathing and staring at the round on the tiled floor—the nose bent outta shape where it hit bone—until he’s strong enough to stand up, take the cloth outta his mouth and smear away the tears and snot on his face, the crimson line of blood down his thigh.

Looks into the bathroom mirror, into his own eyes—he’s Cap-shaped, golden fronds of his staid 1940s’ haircut glued to his forehead with sweat—so he can see the colour of his eyes.

Blue, clear as the sky, with specks of hazel and green dotted around the pupil.

Squints his eyes closed, one after the other, darkness and light and darkness and light and—yeah, okay. Both working, both sides. His Cap shape is immutable, unchanging, because his mental image of this body has never once shifted or changed.

Steve drops the washcloth in the sink, straightens up. Breathes in and breathes out and presses the tip of his thumb to the pawnshop ring on his right hand, to the anchored spell woven into metal, and changes his shape.

He’s eyes open and watching the change happen—watching muscle mass fold in on itself and vanish like endless scarves disappearing up a magician’s sleeve, watching as the long bones of his arms and legs, the ladder of his spine, accordion in on themselves, shorter, shorter.

He’s watching the hair on his head shoot out, and the furrows of his Jotun scarring carve through the skin of his neck, around his shoulders, over his left tit, like an invisible hand is tracing a fingertip through the frosting of a cake.

He’s watching as his eyes change, as the colours of his vision shift along the spectrum. As the blue of his irises fade to pale grey, the purple washcloth in the sink muting to a muddy shade of brown and—

He’s watching as half the world goes out. Like a snuffed candle.

He’s blind in his right eye.

It’s not going away. Not healing, smoothed away by sorcery.

He is a shapeshifter, and any great acts of magic, for good and for ill—they leave their marks in flesh and blood.

The bill comes due.

“ _Pater noster, qui es in caelis_ ,” Steve starts, and then he’s choking back a whine and he’s gotta stop, put his head down and close his eyes. Breathe here, in and out, real slow and controlled.

This is—

Steve doesn’t regret a single Goddamn thing that led to this. He’s got regrets piled up to the rafters about all kinds of shit—failing to notice that he’s been _working for Hydra_ for the last couple years is high on the list—but this—

He can’t _regret_ this. This is the price of winning through. Given how Goddamn steep the price of failure woulda been—Hydra, turning everyone who dared disagree with ‘em into sock puppets, remaking the world in their own image—

He’ll pay this price, willingly. And—

And there’s still a dumb kid part of him that wants to wail and scream, maybe register a formal complaint with God.

Steve clears his throat. Says, “Okay,” and opens his eyes again. They look the same, from the outside: pale grey iris with muted green paint spatters at the centre. From the inside—

From the inside, he’s—the right half of his visual field is a milky shade of grey.

“Okay,” Steve says again, and then he puts his pants back on and—

Opens the bathroom door and Buck is standing about a half a foot away, at-ease stance but every line of muscle and tendon down his arm and in his jaw is pulled tight as garrotting wire.

He’s staring at Steve, eyes darting—head to toe, scanning—

“I’m okay, Buck,” Steve says, breaks the silence, and Bucky twitches and then—

“You screamed. You were screaming. I could hear you.”

Of fuckin’ course he did. Of course he could. Buck can’t opt out of having super senses, the way Steve can. “I promise, I’m fine. I had to—to change my shape a couple times. It hurts, but I’m not hurt.”

He’s not—he won’t—the eye. Sooner or later Steve’ll have to talk about the eye—it’s a factor, tactically. It’s gonna fuck with his depth perception. Christ, he’s gonna have to relearn how to throw knives, how to throw a punch, but—but not yet.

Not _now_ —“We still got any of that ice cream?”

*******

After—

After they destroy another pint of ice cream between ‘em—the fridge and pantry are stocked up, some staple items and some not-so-staples like—like there’s garlic-infused olive oil but no salt, no _bread_ , and Steve imagines some Stark intern sent off with a credit card and no clear idea about how food preparation happens and—

And then Steve hauls Bucky into the bathroom and—he fuckin’ _hates_ giving him orders. Hates any Goddamn thing that hearkens back to Hydra, and how they woulda treated Buck and—and Buck still has Alexander Pierce’s arterial blood in his hair, so—

So Steve gives the order and then stands guard in the hall with the gun and a couple knives. If this is what it takes to get Bucky to unbend enough to get undressed and wash the sweat and dirt and gore off, Steve’ll stand guard like an idiot in an empty apartment on top of one of the world’s most tightly secured buildings for Goddamn hours. For days.

There’s not much he wouldn’t do for Bucky Barnes.

And then—

After Buck emerges again, wet-haired and wild around the eyes and fully dressed, tac jacket and all, reclaims the gun and the knives and makes them disappear into his pockets and thigh holsters, and Steve slams through his own rapid-fire scrub-down in the bathroom and—

And then shepherds Buck into the master bedroom. Steve’s got a checklist in his head and he’s running through it—body stuff, biology stuff, all those mundane tasks he fuckin’ forgets to perform all the time, after sixty-seven years as a disembodied spirit. Calories, hygiene, sleep.

“I’ve got the watch, Buck,” Steve tells him, manually hauling Bucky down onto the bed, boots and P30 and all, and then—

When Steve wakes up, startled and blurry at the edges like he’s been hit in the head, he can feel seam-lines down his cheek where he’s been buried face-first against the denim at Bucky’s hip and his mouth is wet with drool and—

Buck is sitting up against the head of the bed, clear-eyed and alert, one corner of his mouth hooked up into the finest razor-edge of a smile. Steve blinks and mentally braces for—if Sergeant Barnes ever caught your dumb ass sleeping through your watch, you’d hear about it—the whole unit heard about it. Christ, German High Command probably heard about it from Berlin.

But he’s not—he’s not steamed up. He’s not—

“You know, you still Goddamn snore,” Bucky rasps. “Whatever size suit you’re wearing.”

“I don’t snore,” Steve protests, immediate and thoughtless because they’ve been having this argument since they were fifteen years of age, and then—and then he stops, freezes, stares up at Buck because—because _they’ve been having this argument since they were fifteen years of age_.

Because _you still Goddamn snore_.

Because that’s _new_ , that’s old; that’s another memory emerging from the decades-deep scarring inside Bucky’s head.

Because he’s remembering more and more now, colour and detail filling in.

Because he’s starting to heal, and Steve can’t fuckin’ breathe for a second and he’s gotta put his head down again, forehead pressed to the swell of Bucky’s thigh, and pour the whole of his sorcerer’s will into not sobbing.

*******

Midnight and—

Steve is sitting out on the living room floor, drinking coffee outta the biggest mug in the suite’s kitchen—black, because he couldn’t find sugar or creamer, because Tony’s apartment has high-quality reproductions of Steve’s War-era propaganda posters and tablet computers in every room and a coffee machine with enough brain power to terraform Mars, but no fuckin’ sugar to go with the coffee.

He’s parsing the news headlines on a tablet—

And it’s a real mixed bag out there.

Folks have started churning through Hydra’s files, making ‘em searchable, pulling threads of intel out and—

—and three diplomats were arrested in the UN chambers in Vienna twenty minutes ago, their names named as Hydra plants.

FBI agents dragged Vice President-Elect Garry Stern out of his very nice house in Harrisburg three hours ago.

An anonymous cadre of hackers have started unraveling the tangle of offshore accounts and holding corporations that make up Hydra’s cash flow, following the money to nail down the organisations and people who were being paid off by Hydra—and they’re live-tweeting their findings as they go.

And there’s also—it’s been two hours since they announced finding Pierce’s body in _a facility connected to SHIELD_ and there have been three op-eds published already, wailing about how he must have been an innocent victim of SHIELD’s internecine violence.

There’s some kinda pocket-sized civil war happening in and around Fort Dix, cops with riot gear and ViceStar weapons facing off against Army personnel facing off against a bunch of SHIELD agents who have somehow waded into the clusterfuck, and everyone is accusing everyone else of being Hydra, or being controlled by Hydra. And maybe some of ‘em are right, Christ only knows.

There are police stations on fire. There are riots happening in four cities, demonstrations happening in twenty-three more—and some of ‘em are BAST but a lot are just terrified civilians, armed citizens, reaching out to grab the wheel in a world where no one seems to be steering this ship anymore, where no one knows who to trust.

It’s a fuck-awful mess. And Steve—

Steve’s been declared dead, again—or maybe dead and a clone, or maybe an imposter and Hydra.

There’s easy a dozen theories floating around. And they mighta started inside Hydra, spreading disinformation to spoke his wheels if he tried to publicly speak out against ‘em, but if there’s anything the internet loves more than a conspiracy theory—

Which—limits Steve’s options, from here.

Or—or rather, it limits _Captain America_ ’s options. Until someone cuts through the knot—until enough intel comes to light to make sense outta truths and lies and bullshit—

He’d got a text on the secured cellphone. About three hours ago, now—unknown number, plain text.

_HL fnd ur necklace during clean up. Keep ur head dwn til all clear :)_

Which—for starters, it’s interesting that Homeland are doing the clean up in Detroit. And if they’ve got his dog tags they’ll have—his knives, spatters of his blood. Hair samples, fingerprints. They’re gonna know he was inside the factory.

And maybe that’s good—establishes him as on the ground, fighting against Hydra. Unless—unless Homeland don’t find the thread that connects the HammerTech factory to Hydra, in which case—

In which case he just looks like a domestic terrorist.

Steve closes his eyes, breathes out, shoves the tablet away. Drinks another slug of coffee—his fucking body clock is ass-backwards.

He’ll take Natasha’s advice, for now anyway. Keep his head down, find an entry point and help out from behind the scenes.

It was Natasha, the message, he figures. Got another text from the same number an hour or so before that message—one image file. It’s a photo of some Godawful looking green smoothie in a to-go cup, held up like this shot is gonna be worthy of some kinda photojournalism award. Woman’s hand, neat nails, fingers folded so just the thumb and forefinger are in the shot. Off focus, in the background, you can see the back of a head—brunette, shoulder-length hair.

It’s Natasha’s code—thumb and forefinger against something green means _all clear_ ; the brunette in the background—no distinguishing marks, nothing that’d mean anythin’ to anyone else, unless you happen to know Natasha was with Maria Hill when she went dark, so—

It means they got out, after the data dump at the Triskelion. Means they’re in the wind, means they’re safe.

Nat and Hill, Tony, Clint. Matt, back in Hells’ Kitchen tonight. Sam at his Mom’s house, and—and an anonymous call placed to the cops in Atlantic City, information dropped about a certain suite in a certain hotel, so Sharon Carter should be out by now, cuffs off and breathing in the free air. Hydra is bleeding out; if there is still sleeper programming in her head, it’s not gonna make any kinda difference now.

She’s out. She’s safe.

Or as safe as any of ‘em are, right now.

And given that—

“ _Captain Rogers?_ ”

Steve fuckin’ learns the spell for levitation, or maybe for leaping his skeleton straight outta his skin— _Jesus sweet fucking Christ on a_ —

It’s JARVIS, speaking low and confidential from thin air, just above Steve’s right ear. There’s a black glass panel set in the wall, glossy and opaque—that’s gotta be him. Cameras and sensors and microphones and speakers.

“Yeah, JARVIS?” Deep Goddamn breath in, and—he shakes his left hand outta the conjuring gesture, puts his coffee mug down on the floor, licks the slopped coffee off his hand and wrist.

“ _As you’re awake, I thought you’d like to know: Doctor Banner has just arrived from the airport. He’d like to speak with you, at your convenience_.”

Holy Mary, Mother of— _Bruce_.

Last Steve’d heard he was still in Nepal. Musta dropped everything and jumped on a plane when he’d got word about—everything.

“Yeah, I… Yeah. I’ve got nothing but time. I’ll come see him now?”

There’s silence for a few seconds, JARVIS pinging back to Bruce with that answer.

Steve picks himself up off the living room floor, puts his coffee mug on an empty bookshelf—takes concentration, getting the distance right; every Goddamn thing is just that little bit harder when you’re only seeing half the picture. Stretches until his spine pops. Pads on bare feet over to the bedroom door to peer inside.

Bucky is still on the bed, still out cold, boots on and hair in tangles across his face and the hilt of Clint’s hook-pointed knife poking out from under a pillow. Steve had spun a silencing veil in a bubble around him when he got up—Christ knows Buck needs sleep, and he wasn’t gonna get any if he’d jumped outta bed with a gun in each hand every time Steve farts or opens the fridge or thinks too loud.

“ _Doctor Banner can see you now, Captain Rogers,_ ” JARVIS murmurs, and—

In the lift, Steve hums Star Spangled Man and pours power on and through the song until it quickens—until the engine of the spell fires and turns over and—

Shifts his shape over to his big body, because that’s the _him_ that Bruce has always known. Captain America, super soldier, great big hero type.

He’s gotta assume—

Bruce and Tony have always been thick as thieves.

Spoke the same language, got the same jokes, mutually admired one another’s huge scientific breakthroughs.

There’s a dimension to their friendship that Steve can only scratch at the surface of, because he’d given his aborted attempt at a college career to the study of fine arts, sorcery, and underground queer bars, and not… particle physics.

So Steve’s gotta assume that Tony’s told Bruce— _something_. Something about Steve, about the shapeshifting, about his magic, about who he really is. And Steve’s not a rampaging narcissist—he’s a long way away from being the most interesting topic of conversation, on a day when there are literal Nazis being hauled kicking and screaming out of public office and half of the continental United States is on fire. But it’s still—it’s good odds that Bruce knows something.

Or _thinks_ he knows something.

Which—is a complication. Because of Bruce’s work, and the serum, and the _Hulk_. Because he’d destroyed his life trying to walk in Erskine’s footsteps, and Steve—

Steve’s lies made that possible.

“JARVIS, wait a second,” Steve says, and he can hear his own voice but it sounds tinny and distant, radio distorted by a storm, and his hands are numb and clumsy, blunt instruments, as he grabs for the railing on the lift wall—gotta anchor himself to something, gotta—feels like he’s lifted half-outta his body.

“ _Captain Rogers, your heart rate is elevated. I feel you’re distressed. Shall I call for help?_ ”

_Fuck—_ “No, just—just—stop the lift. Gimme a second.” Steve stumbles through the words. Squeezes at the railing and focuses up on his breath like his Da taught him seventy-some years ago, because he does not fucking have time for a panic attack right now, or anytime Goddamn soon.

Push it down and move some furniture over the top of it and just—just fuckin’ _breathe_ , you idiot.

His hands are shaking. He squeezes harder.

Focus up and—and count the breath, count ‘em, in and out. Slow it down—two, three—

“ _Captain Rogers_ ,” JARVIS begins, and—

“ _Fuck_ ,” Steve says, out loud this time, and then: “Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m okay, please, just—gimme a second.”

Ends up taking longer’n a second to walk himself back from the cliff.

He’s gotta count the pattern of his in-breaths, out-breaths, focusing on the patter of his heart, forcing the breath out longer, slower. Gotta draw every thread of attention outta his head, outta the screaming shitstorm happening in his brain pan, and pay real specific attention to his fingertips, sunk into the metal of the railing. To his toes, over-snug inside the boots that don’t fit either of his bodies. To the line of his spine and the knotted snarl of pulled-tense muscle in his shoulders, his arms, his thighs.

When Steve opens his eyes again, the first thing he sees is the lift railing, warped and buckled like a chewed-flat drinking straw and hanging offa the wall. “God—shit. I’m sorry, JARVIS. Can you—tell Tony, I’ll fix this.”

“ _It’s quite all right, Captain,_ ” JARVIS answers, bland as oatmeal, and then: “ _Shall we return to your suite_?”

At some point in the last couple years, Tony’s robot butler has developed a Goddamn subroutine for dealing with people having panic attacks. Which is a fascinating fuckin’ insight, says a lot about Tony or JARVIS or both of ‘em, but—

“No, I’m okay,” Steve lies. “Can you take me to Bruce?”

There’s a half-second silent pause as JARVIS fucking doubts that very much, and then the lift doors slide open and—

Bruce Banner is standing about four feet away, in the foyer area of—this must be his suite, his floor of the Tower. Because that’s a normal thing for folks to have.

He’s in mid-hand wring, distracted like he’s halfway through a set of calculations in his head. Looks rumpled, creased at the edges like he’s just lurched off a long-haul flight in the last couple hours, a couple months overdue for a haircut.

“Steve.” He drops the hand-wringing and moves forward, meets Steve in the middle coming outta the lift, and—they do the half-handshake, half-back patting thing that fellas seem to do now, meeting a friend, because at some point between 1945 and 2012, American white fella society decided that _hugging_ was off limits if you ain’t a dame, or a blood relation, or a queer.

“You’re okay,” Bruce says, and it’s not entirely a statement but it ain’t a question either, stepping back enough to look Steve over, head to toe, his expression a cocktail of—confusion, and fear, and relief.

“I’m okay,” Steve confirms, and—

“Reuters thinks you’re dead,” Bruce answers, fishing a cell phone out of his pants pocket and waggling it in the air.

And Christ, if _Steve_ felt outta the loop trying to piece together a couple hours of lost time from cable news feeds, then how Goddamn baffled Bruce must have been, trying to make sense of what the Hell was going on via headlines and Tweets on his postage stamp-sized phone screen, in Goddamn Nepal.

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Steve answers.

They swap intel—moving deeper into the apartment, which is more-or-less the same as Steve’s floor, at a quick glance-over, but with more colour, soothing blues and greys and browns in the art, the furniture, the carpets. Into the kitchen, where Bruce starts the kettle boiling and makes tea and—

Steve gives a Cliff’s Notes version of the last seventy-two hours—Hydra, running and hiding, the mission, the fallout. Bruce sips at tea that looks like it was scraped up from the floor under a florist’s workbench and listens, offers a couple tidbits—the headlines he’s been reading, increased security in the airports he passed through, and—

“Tony’s been sending me… stuff. I—has he _slept_ any, in the last few days?”

“Not as far as I can tell,” Steve answers, and his metronome-regular super soldier heart squeezes like a fist in his chest because if Tony’s been _sending Bruce stuff_ then—

“I can’t tell anymore, what’s actual data and what’s Tony being Tony,” Bruce is saying, putting the mug of tea down and digging out his phone again, and then he’s swiping at something on screen, holding it out.

“He sent me this.”

It’s a—looks like an image grab from JARVIS, from one of Tony’s camera feeds. Steve, in his little body, his real body, sitting hunched like a gremlin in the chair in Tony’s workshop. You can make out Bucky, standing behind him, can see him from the chest down but—but the image is cut to frame Steve, front and centre.

It’s Tony’s system, Tony’s cameras, so the image is pretty good. You can see his features, the streaks of dried blood on his T-shirt, the feral Goddamn mess of his hair after shapeshifting and fighting and puking and bleeding.

You can see that it’s Steve Rogers.

And Steve’s gone silent, staring at—what in the Christ is he supposed to say, what can he possibly say to make any kind of sense of—

“That’s real,” Bruce says, and—and he’s studying Steve’s face, reading him like he’s blotched on the glass of a slide under a scope, like—“That’s you.”

Fuck. _Ave Maria, gratia plena_ —

“That’s me,” Steve confirms, and—and you’d think that this would be getting easier by now, the coming clean, the coming out, but—but this is Bruce Banner, and—

Bruce is staring at him, staring into his face like he’s examining Steve down to the cellular level.

“Holy cow,” he breathes out, putting the phone down on the kitchen counter with a trembling hand, and he doesn’t take his eyes off Steve for so much as a second, and then: “Holy cow. You’re like me.”

Oh, _Goddamn it all to Hell_.

“Bruce,” Steve starts, and—

“You’re like me,” Bruce repeats. He finger-combs a hand into the rat’s nest of his curls, shifting his weight, shifting his gaze up to the far wall. “It all makes sense, now. I read every scrap of Erskine’s notes, I followed _every thread_ —and it was never going to matter, because Erskine never achieved a stable transformation.”

“Bruce,” Steve says again, and his gut is churning, low and tight, and he can feel his mouth trying to turn down at the corners, and—

“What triggers the change for you?” Bruce asks, shoving his glasses back up his nose with one finger. “I mean, it’s clearly not—I thought it was just anger, for me, at first anyway, but then I realised there were several components: heart rate, blood pressure, sympathetic nervous system activation. And obviously it just _happens_ if I’m hurt, like biomechanical trauma just blows past every threshold and suddenly I’m gone. But your transformation…”

Bruce is staring into the air above Steve’s head, one hand tracing circles in the air like he’s rearranging puzzle pieces of thought into some kind of sequence.

“It’s too self-sustaining and coherent to be tied to any autonomic functions. You can _control_ it—when you change, when you change back.”

Bruce is—he’s looking dead at Steve now, poised and still, waiting, and— and he’s just about fuckin’ glowing with—with purpose, with the laser-hot focus of his attention, because he’d worked for Goddamn years to crack Erskine’s serum, and he thinks—

And the silence has drawn out a heartbeat too long, and Bruce is—he’s starting to cock his head to the side, brow tightening into furrows.

“I can control it,” Steve says. Closes his eyes and fists his hands and—and he can hear Bruce drawing breath in the quiet, like he’s gonna launch into the science talk again, so—“I can control it because it’s mine. The shape change didn’t come from Erskine. His formula didn’t work for me. I’m not human.”

There’s silence again for—for a good five seconds, longer drawing out, and—

“I know I feel that way sometimes, too,” Bruce says, cautiously.

Jesus fucking Christ—Steve is tryin’ to confess his worst Goddamn sin and Bruce is hearing some kinda cry for help, gonna turn this into the first annual meeting of the serum survivors support group. Because he’s a good man, and a good friend, and it wouldn’t even fucking occur to him that—

“Bruce, listen to me. I don’t mean like I _feel_ inhuman. I mean I am biologically not human, as in my Goddamn father was a space alien or something—”

— _or something_ , because they still don’t know about Loki, can’t know about Loki—

“I mean I was a genetic freak before I went into the chamber for Rebirth. I mean I faked my transformation in Rebirth because I didn’t want to let everybody down, because they cut the light show and shut it all down midway through the trial and I was still me, Bruce, this scrawny little puke rattling around inside a chamber built for Superman. So I used what I can do, my alien genetic bullshit, and I changed myself. And then I faked my way through a whole Goddamn World War. Erskine’s serum—it maybe woulda worked, if they’d tried it on a human. But I ain’t that.”

There’s—dead quiet, for a long moment.

Bruce is staring, something wild in the whites of his eyes, in the line of his jaw, like he’s slowly fraying. “You faked your transformation. _How do you fake a transformation_?”

“With sorcery,” Steve answers, voice going thin like he’s gotta push it out past the ghost of a _geas_ spell, worn away by saltwater most of a century ago.

“Sorcery. Like, _magic_?” Bruce swallows, hands fisting and opening again, eyes darting over Steve like he’s looking for the seams, for the stamp of authenticity. “They examined you. They took your _blood_.”

“It was really Goddamn convincing sorcery,” Steve says, and Bruce is still looking at Steve like he’s not sure which of ‘em is crazy, so—“Here, okay? Watch this.”

He’d layered up the spell in the pawnshop ring, so it’s good for another couple changes yet. Can feel the magic woven into the metal, lying sleek as nail lacquer between the layers of the molecules, like it’s static cling to the tip of his thumb, pressing on the band and breathing _in_ and—

The spell unfolds through him, a time-lapse film of a plant bursting from seed and shoots and leaves and—and he’s eyes closed as it happens so he doesn’t gotta watch Bruce’s face as he shrinks in on himself, ugly fuckin’ truth emerging from fiction, and then the music washes over him—the world music, Tower song and Steve’s song and the lightest trilling of sunlight and chlorophyll from Bruce’s fuckin’ tea and—

Bruce’s song.

It’s an orchestral piece, complex and dynamic, one of those numbers featuring cannon fire and it’s—

The last time Steve heard this song was immediately after the Battle of New York. It was slow, jagged, because Bruce was exhausted, post-Hulk and delirious with hunger and relief. But now—

Now it’s full-tilt, full-pelt running. Chaotic. The lurching wail of violins sound an awful lot like alarm klaxons.

Steve opens his eyes.

Bruce is breathing slow, controlled, his nostrils flaring a fraction with the in-breath. His hands are still closing and opening, tight enough to see white skin across his knuckles.

“That’s…” He starts, stops. His jaw works. He’s blinking hard and looking Steve up and down, his eyes darting from data point to data point—the scarring on Steve’s neck, the flash of brown and grey and black feathers trapped in the skin of his forearms. The S-curve of his spine. The wreck of his hair.

The wide pools of his wolf eyes.

“You’re…” Bruce tries again, one hand coming up to half-point, wavering like he’s not sure where to start, and Steve cocks his head to the side and tugs at the neck of his T-shirt to display the line of his Jotun scarification.

“Not human,” Steve says. “This is my real body. I lied, because I didn’t want to break Erskine’s heart. And then he was killed and the serum was lost and all they had to show for it was me, so I kept lying and there wasn’t any way off the ride that wasn’t gonna destroy people’s lives, so I just—didn’t stop lying.”

“You lied. For seventy years.” His raised hand has furled into something like a claw now. His voice comes dead, cold and empty as the vacuum of space. All expression has drained from his face, just—there’s something ugly about the set of his jaw, the line of his mouth. Tension coiling, muscle pulling tight beneath the surface.

“I…” Steve starts, stops. Draws in a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry,” Bruce repeats, careful and precise like it’s in a foreign language, like he’s mulling over the layers of meaning.

“I didn’t know I wasn’t human until—after.” After Rebirth, after Abraham Erskine had gone into the ground. Far too late to take it back.

“You’re _sorry_ ,” Bruce says again, and it comes out distorted, thicker than anything human. He’s half-turned away, like he doesn’t even wanna look at Steve right now, hands clenched in fists at his side. “I mean, you just—tanked the most important experiment of the 20th century, and turned every piece of data and research that came from it into a pile of nonsense and bullshit. And _my life_.”

His hands come up to his head, fingers digging into the tangle of his greying curls. Voice is coming faster, notes of gravelly distortion grinding in and out, driving lower and thicker as he keeps talking, keeps spilling over. “I mean, you just turned _my life_ into a pile of bullshit, because it turns out I was basing all my work on _fucking fairytales_ which makes me, what—the Goddamn monster under the bridge, now, I— _oh, God_.”

“I’m so Goddamn sorry, Bruce,” Steve says, helplessly, and—

“ _Get out_ ,” Bruce growls, low and guttural, and there’s a puce note to the skin of his face, a pasty almost-grey around his eyes, his carotid artery standing out green as uncooked spinach on the side of his neck, and—

“I’m going,” Steve says, shoving down the brain-dead prey animal impulse to veil himself, disappear off the radar _now right now_ because that—that will _not help_ and—and he’s striding back through the apartment and—

—can hear the crunch of something breaking behind him, something wooden, furniture or a wall or—into the lift, doors open and ready to receive him and—

Closing behind him and Steve breathes out, sags against the wall of the lift, breathes in tight and heaving, gasping, eyes closed.

_Christ_. Jesus fuckin’ Christ, oh God, oh— _fuck_. That was—

That was what he deserves, probably. But Christ, it still Goddamn—stings. _Fuck_.

Steve turns, leans his shoulder into the wall and presses the heels of his palms to his eye sockets. He’s aware of the lift moving, JARVIS wordlessly taking him outta the blast radius—

Oh God, Bruce. He’s not _actually_ —he won’t turn. Won’t let the Other Guy out—he’s got a fine handle on it now, after half a decade of sharing skin with the Hulk. He’s not gonna shift over in a skyscraper in the middle of Goddamn Manhattan, no matter how pissed off he is.

But getting outta there, letting him get a handle on it—

Sometimes cowardice is the course of wisdom.

Deep breath, in and out. He shifts his weight, plants his butt against the broken railing, lowers his hands away from his face and just—breathes, in and out, folding his fingers into the gestures of conjuring and working through them, slow and systematic. Concentrates on the feel of his lungs filling, ribcage swinging open, on the feel of fingertips and tendons and bones shifting, the dull ache in his knuckles from too many spells, too much magic.

If his eyes are burning, if—if his breath spasms in his chest, flinches away from the bruised feeling under his sternum, that’s—that’s what he deserves. This is what he deserves. The bill comes due.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter to go, loves.
> 
> I feel like I need to start warning y'all now--in case you've blundered in here without having read any of the other works in this arc--that, uhh, we're not really headed for a happy ending in the classical sense here. I mean the story will wrap up and there will be a clear path forward, but there's still a lot of shit for everyone to unpack. And the unpacking of that will begin in Arc 5.
> 
> I just wanted to be clear in case there are folks all geared up for Bucky to be entirely cured in the next couple thousand words, through the power of love (and healing cock), and then everyone sets up in the Tower and they all have movie nights. And every reader who has been here since The Truth May Vary, which literally ended with Steve drowning and freezing and accepting death, well--y'all know what kind of a Goddamn sadist I am.
> 
> If the ending is bittersweet, or just straight-up bitter, then it's not the end yet.
> 
> There is a lot of story still to tell. I hope y'all trust me enough to stick around for the journey.
> 
> xoxo


	21. Chapter 21

Walking back into his suite and—and it’s been less’n twenty minutes but it feels longer. Feels like Steve’s lost time, somewhere, under the ice letting years slip past in a fugue.

Through the foyer and past the kitchen and—and he’s slowing, dribbling to a stop, and—

If Steve were wolf-shaped, the hair of his hackles would be bunched up like exclamation marks. There’s something— _off_ , outta alignment. Something that tastes like iron and bile and _threat_. Nothin’ he can put his finger on; it’s just under the surface of his upstairs brain, of his conscious awareness. Something he’s smelling, or—

Or hearing.

_Bucky’s song._

It’s—muffled, past layers of Tower music, the whine of electronic song and—

—but it’s _wailing_ , cutting as the edge of a razor, coming fast and jagged and—

It hasn’t sounded like this in days. Not since the hospital, the loading bay. Not since he was shooting Steve’s seeming in the head.

_Holy Mother Mary, what_ —what’s happened, what in the Hell coulda happened in the last twenty minutes to—

Steve’s moving, thoughtless as a sunflower pivoting south to face the sun, cutting left and—into the master bedroom. Empty—he’s scanning, catching details in snatches: sheets rumpled on the bed, one pillow on the floor like it’s slipped, fallen. The hook-point knife is still poking out from under the pillow’s twin on the bed. There’s—there’s a very faint scent of fear sweat and bile, of—

Soft, wet hitching noise, like—from the bathroom. From the ensuite. Keep moving.

Through the bedroom and—tile underfoot, lights blazing overhead like phosphorus and—

Buck is on the floor, hunched and his back to the wall. He’s wedged between the toilet and the vanity, like he needed something solid to protect his flanks, a wounded animal denning in the first enclosed space they can find, and—

He’s got his meat hand over his mouth. Coils of dark hair falling forward across his face. Everything stinks of vomit and terror.

“Bucky,” Steve says, blurts, and Buck twitches, once, violent, and—Steve can see his eyes, now, steel grey behind the mess of his hair, staring up at him like he’s studying a heavily fortified position. Like there’s no going back, but the way forward means walking into artillery fire.

“What’s wrong?” Steve asks, because he’s the most useless piece of shit on God’s green earth, and—

“Lights,” Bucky croaks, and—and Steve blinks, slaps at the wall until he finds the switch and—and Buck is up, twisting to—he’s flicking the tap on, running water into the sink, dashes his right hand under the faucet and then drops again. Leaves the water flowing.

It’s—white noise. It’s cover.

Steve kills the lights—JARVIS would have switched ‘em on, a simple automatic kindness, when Bucky first lurched in here. Steps closer, moving so he can—so he can see what Bucky’s doing: he’s tracing a shape on the glossy side of the vanity cabinet, smearing the water from the tap with a fingertip—

Writing. It’s writing.

Steve goes to his knees, gets closer—close enough to smell Bucky’s sweat, close enough to press his knees to Buck’s booted feet.

Close enough to read the smeared word in a darkened room—there’s light spilling through from the bedroom, one of the bedside lamps, soft and golden, but it can’t find them here, tucked in this corner. Bucky’s hand is shaking as he traces the last letter, muted sheen of the water drying on his fingertip, on the surface of the cabinet.

_STARK_.

Steve reads, blinks, and—and Bucky’s watching him, watching close, close enough to see the recognition and confusion on Steve’s face. He smears away the word, the name, with the heel of his palm. His mouth is a grim line, lips bloodless.

He’d looked like this in the War, sometimes. More’n once, God help them. _We’re in the shit, Stevie. We’re in it fuckin’ deep_.

“Stark?” Steve asks, and—and he pitches it low, soft, because Bucky has taken steps—the running water, the dark—to keep this conversation between the two of ‘em, and he’s scared spitless besides, so—so being soft, being gentle, like Steve’s easing his way up to a spooked horse, and—

Bucky leans forward. Catches Steve by the back of the neck with—it’s his right hand, his human hand, and Steve can feel calluses pressed against the bony ladder rungs of his cervical spine. Buck is close enough to feel the heat from his breath against Steve’s ear. “Who is he?”

He’s whispering; Steve’s hearing is rat-shit in this body, can only just catch the words. “Tony? He’s—he’s a friend, Bucky, he’s okay.”

Bucky huffs, wordless—not the intel he was looking for.

Try again: “He’s an engineer. An inventor. And a soldier. Fights for the good guys, Buck. I promise he’s safe.”

There’s—quiet for a long moment, past the hush of the running faucet. Steve draws back enough to see Bucky’s face, to see—he’s processing, eyes darting, fitting those data points into whatever’s going on in his head. Making sense of the scattered shrapnel of memories and scarring and—

“Did he—” Bucky starts, stops. Swallows. His gaze is fixed now, locked and staring past Steve and into the empty of the bathroom. “Did he have a—a father. Maybe an uncle. Died in—in a car crash?”

Steve’s gut drops like that time he rode his motorbike off a fuckin’ escarpment in the forested armpit of fuckin’ Germany. Like the Arctic Sea biting ice into the tissue of his skin and muscle and organs while he kicked and clawed at the ocean to stay alive.

His voice comes cold and distant and dead as the moon when he finally answers. “His father was Howard Stark.”

Bucky’s hand spasms against the back of Steve’s neck. He closes his eyes, muscle in his jaw working, breath coming short and sharp. Doesn’t reply for a long moment. Steve swallows, breathes in and breathes out, careful and controlled.

Bucky opens his eyes. “I killed him.”

Steve can’t say a Goddamn thing for—for one heartbeat, two, three, silence drawing out and—and he’s trying but every thought in his head is bouncing offa each other, trains derailing.

That—that can’t be true—

“No,” he says at last. “Buck, that—that can’t be right. It was—it was an accident.”

“Made it look like an accident,” Bucky rasps, quiet as the grave. “I remember, Steve. I _remember doing it_. He—Howard. Did—did he…”

“Howard worked with our unit in the War,” Steve says. Feels like he’s talking from the far end of an underground tunnel, voice distorted by distance. He’s dimly aware past the numb that—that there’s a white-hot pain in the centre of his chest, like a cigarette burn to the muscle of his heart.

He’s— _fuck_. Fucking _Christ_ —

He knew Bucky’s handlers—his _owners_ —over the decades have been… cruel. Unspeakably Goddamn cruel—there is scar tissue deep in the meat of Bucky’s brain, metal plating running the length of his spine, marks carved in every inch of his body and soul but—

But this is evil in a way that Steve can’t get his fucking head around. This is—

They used Bucky. Outta all the triggermen in the Goddamn world, they used Bucky Barnes to assassinate Howard and Maria Stark.

“You knew him. We both knew him.”

“Fuck,” Bucky says, flat, hollowed out. He’s still staring past Steve, pale as a corpse, his hand limp and sagging on Steve’s shoulder. “Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.”

“Jesus, Buck,” Steve says, helplessly because—because _fuck_ , Jesus _fucking Christ_. What—what can he possibly fucking _say_ —

“He’s your friend,” Bucky says, and—he’s looking Steve square in the eye now. Hand is shaking on the nape of Steve’s neck. He’s—he’s worked the equation, come to some kinda conclusion in the last thirty seconds, while Steve was fraying like a cheap shirt. “Howard Stark was. The son, he is. Your friends.”

“Yeah,” Steve says, blinking, and—

Bucky nods, crisp like he’s taking an order straight from General Eisenhower, and he’s blinking hard, pale, jaw set like he’s staring down a firing squad and—and then he’s grabbing the vanity top, levering up to his feet.

Steve falls back, ass on the tiled floor to get outta the way and—and Bucky’s moving, striding forward, back straight as an arrow and tension in every line of muscle and tendon and bone.

He’s out and stalking through the bedroom, on a fuckin’ mission, and Steve’s scrambling, clawing his way up off the floor, slapping the tap off and in pursuit.

Misjudges the distance and clips the bathroom doorframe with his shoulder—fuck this useless eye, _fuck every Goddamn thing_ —“Buck, _wait_.”

Bucky is—Steve catches a glimpse of him, out the bedroom door and bearing right, heading for—for the foyer, front of the apartment and—

—and he ain’t stopping. Ain’t slowing down.Of all the fuckin’ times for him to decide he can ignore Steve’s orders.

Steve puts on a burst of speed—outta the bedroom and around, into the sprawling foyer space and—Bucky is standing at the lift doors, hands in fists at his sides.

“I need Stark,” Bucky’s saying, head back like he’s talking to the ceiling, like he’s got a direct line with the Big Guy Upstairs, and—

“ _Bucky_ ,” Steve calls, half-running across the glossy floor to catch up and—and he’s grabbing Buck by the shoulder and hauling him around. “Buck, what’s—what’s going on?”

Bucky blinks down at Steve. There is something—his facial expression has gone neutral, empty, but—but Steve’s been staring calf-eyed at this idiot mick for decades outta his life, and there is something _vulnerable_ in the lines of Bucky’s face. Around his eyes, in the softness of his mouth. Something flayed open.

“I’m going to tell him,” Bucky says.

Steve makes a noise like someone’s kicked him in the diaphragm, a punched-out near-silent grunt. He’s gaping, mouth fallen open and—he’s got no control over what his face is doing right now.

Every Goddamn shred of his awareness is in the feel of Bucky’s jacket, bunched in Steve’s fingers. In the blazing trainwreck happening inside his head. He doesn’t—he can’t—

The lift doors slide open.

“ _Mr Stark can receive you in the workshop_ ,” JARVIS says, smooth as silk on a shoe shine, and—

“No,” Steve yelps, because—Christ.

_Fucking Christ_.

This can’t be happening, this can’t happen. This will—this will destroy them, this will—

Bucky strides forward, into the lift. Steve—his hand is closing, uselessly, the feel of jacket fabric and the warmth of Bucky’s shoulder still clinging to his fingertips, to his palm—

“Wait,” Steve rasps, and heaves himself forward.

Into the lift. It’s—maybe it’s been fixed in the last half hour, or maybe it’s a different carriage: the hand rail running around the wall is whole, intact, like Steve’d never laid a hand on it.

The doors slide closed behind him, smooth as the curved edge of a razor blade. There’s the almost imperceptible shift of pressure, of weight—they’re moving. On the way.

Bucky is standing, staring up at the shifting numbers in the display above the door, passive as a crash test dummy. Like every play has already been made and all he can do now is move with the momentum, with the inertia. Steve grabs him again, both hands now, pulling Buck down so—so he’s ear-height with Steve’s mouth, Steve rocking up on his tiptoes to meet him.

It’s almost an embrace.

Steve pitches his voice softer than breath, lips close to the curve of Bucky’s throat so—so he can’t be heard, so they can’t see his mouth movin’, because JARVIS is everywhere and he can’t know, he _can’t know_ —

“You can’t. Buck. You can’t tell him.”

“He’s your friend,” Bucky answers, his breath warm on Steve’s throat. “I can’t—he deserves to know.”

Steve closes his eyes. Bites back the urge to keen like a kicked pup.

It’s— _he’s right_ , he’s right and Tony does need to know, but—but fucking _Christ on a crutch_. Mary, Mother of God.

This is—“But—but it doesn’t have to be _now_. It doesn’t have to be right now.”

“You think he’s gonna take it better in a week?” Bucky whispers. “In a month? With the thing that killed his parents shacked up under his roof the whole time?”

Steve—his breath catches in his chest, frozen, reeling. He—he can’t—

_The thing_. _The_ thing _that killed his parents_ —

Does… Does Buck really think of himself—

Bucky’s pulling back, shifting so they’re face to face, close. His eyes are burning bright, burning cold as steel in the dead of winter.

He mouths the words, silent, staring from close enough he’s gotta dart his gaze from one of Steve’s eyes to the other. “ _He deserves to know_.”

“He’ll—he’s gonna—” Steve tries, stumbling because—

—because he doesn’t _know_ how Tony’s gonna react. He doesn’t know.

Knows that the death of Tony’s parents is a scar that never healed right, and—

“So maybe he’s got a right,” Bucky breathes. “You said I could choose what I do, now. I’m choosing.”

Steve’s breath hitches in his chest again. Comes out thin and frail.

Steve is really Goddamn practiced at lying. He’s made a Goddamn career outta conjuring illusions or spinning bullshit into a convincing web of golden fiction. Because he’s a freak, and a queer, and half fuckin’ space alien, so he’s lied to hide what he is, who he is, to protect himself and the people around him, because he’s _had_ to, and—

Bucky has always been the braver of the two of ‘em.

The lift doors slide open. Bucky slips outta Steve’s hands and walks into the open.

_Ave Maria, gratia plena_ —

“You don’t gotta do this, Buck,” Steve says, following after—Christ, he would follow Buck into the mouth of Hell if he asked it, but this is—across the slick granite sea of the foyer. The glass doors of the workshop are sliding open to meet them. Bucky marches like—it’s a bipedal avalanche, the way he walks after however many decades with a metal arm, steel plating on his bones: heavy and deliberate and unstoppable.

And he doesn’t stop. Doesn’t slow down.

Steve follows. Stumbling, in boots that don’t fuckin’ fit right. He feels staticky and numb at his fingertips, his toes, like his soul is only loosely attached to his meat suit. Like if he tripped he’d slip right outta his skin, scattering across the glossy black floor like a dropped sack of groceries.

Through and into the workshop. The glass doors slide closed behind them. Steve can hear the soft magnetic thud of the locks engaging—automatic, security protocol because every single thing in this room is proprietary, and Steve’s heard those locks engage maybe a hundred fuckin’ times before but it’s never—he’s never—

“Sergeant,” Tony calls out. He’s stood at one of the workbenches up the back of the lab, closest to the massive bank of manufacturing machines. Waves casually with—it’s some tiny tool with a point of light on one end.

He glances up from his work, takes ‘em in—Buck, Steve bringing up the rear, both of ‘em moving at speed and—

“And Mini-Steve,” Tony adds, distracted, going back to—he’s got a dismantled section of a suit spread out across the workbench in front of him, hologram schematics traced in orange light hovering above the components.

He looks—pretty good for one o’clock in the morning. Alert, combed. Better than earlier; musta caught some sleep in there, a shower, done the body maintenance stuff. He’s wearing one of his tatty old band shirts, has swapped out the jeans for tracksuit pants. Can see the bandage over his IV access under one sleeve.

Across the workshop, JARVIS is still running feed from cable news, Twitter, pulling data from Hydra’s files—there’s a world map in the centre of the hologram display, lighting up with pinpoints, Hydra cells or plants or bases or—

“ _Buck Rogers in the 21st Century_. That’s your portmanteau, by the way. You know about portmanteaus, right? What can I do for you, gentlemen?”

Bucky snaps to a stop, dead centre of the sprawling open space in the middle of the workshop. Stands like he’s presenting for inspection, back straight, head back. “I need to tell you.”

_Fucking Christ, this is happening_.

Steve lurches to a halt at Bucky’s ten o’clock—he ain’t between ‘em, not exactly, but—but if he needs to get between ‘em he can. Position, angle, standing so he can see them both without turning his head.

He’s mapping the terrain of the workshop in his head, cover and threats and entry-exit points. His heart is hiccuping in his chest like he’s finally gonna have that thunderclap stroke the doctors have been warning him about since he was sixteen.

_Bucky gets to choose_. Bucky has chosen. He’s—he ain’t had free will for seventy years, and if this is—if this is his choice then Steve ain’t gonna countermand that but—

“What’s—” Tony starts, stops. Looks up again from—he’s got most of a suit gauntlet in one hand, and he—he was concentrating, working, but—Bucky’s got his full attention, now.

“Huh. What’s up, sarge?”

“Mission report,” Bucky replies, and he’s—he’s staring ahead like a mannequin, hands in fists by his sides and shaking, shaking like a dry drunk, shaking like muscle is trying to cleave away from bone. “December 16, 1991.”

Tony—goes still. Frozen, for a long moment.

Then he lowers the gauntlet and tool to the workbench in front of him, slow and easy like they’re sinking through custard.

Doesn’t take his eyes offa Buck for a second.

That _date_ —Tony’s gotta have that date carved in marble at the very top of his list of regrets—

“What did you say?”

“Mission report. December 16—”

“What mission?” Tony asks, deadly quiet, rolling his shoulders back like he’s slowly expanding into every inch of his skin. “What was the mission?”

“Tony,” Steve starts, and Tony flicks a hand at him like—like he’s training a puppy or something, hand open for silence and—and it also looks a whole lot like when he’s levelling a repulsor at your face, open palm and the core of light in the centre. He doesn’t look away from Buck.

There’s silence for a couple heartbeats, and then: “I had to tell you,” Bucky rasps again.

“Buck,” Steve says, helplessly, like some kinda fuckin’ idiot—it’s like being disembodied again, like there’s a thick pane of glass between him and the world and all he can do is watch.

“So tell me,” Tony says, his voice gone low and raw, pressing his knuckles into the surface of the bench.

“Sanction and extract,” Bucky grates out. “No witnesses. I couldn’t leave witnesses, I had to…”

He falls silent again, mouth half-open like he’s trying to shape the words and failing. His eyes are most of the way closed, and—darting, side to side, Steve can see ‘em moving beneath the eyelid like he’s sorting through shards of memory inside his skull.

“Tell me,” Tony says again, sounding—wounded, like he’s bleeding out somewhere vital, like he’s—

“They were moving the materiel,” Bucky rattles off. “Civilian transport, quiet road—it was the best place to hit ‘em, make the extraction. Anywhere else woulda—been more casualties. Make it quick, make it quiet. Make it look like an accident.”

There’s silence for a long moment—just the background purr of Tony’s machines, the workshop white noise of manufacture and repair.

Bucky is—he’s trembling, mouth-breathing shallow and rapid like someone’s socked him in the solar plexus and he can’t get enough air in. His gaze is fixed now, glued to the workbench Tony’s standing at, blank and sightless as a corpse. And Tony—

Tony is pale as spoilt milk, spine rigid like it’s shaped from steel. He’s shaking too, leaning into the press of his fists against the bench. He’s fixed on Buck like he’s laser targeting, mouth a flat line.

Tony breaks the silence. “What are you telling me?”

“Two casualties. The engineer, and his wife.” Bucky sounds like he’s talking out of an open grave, distant and hollow and—

“ _What are you telling me_?” Tony barks, and—

“I killed your parents.”

It lands like a flashbang, dead quiet spilling out like the shock wave from a nuke. Tony is wild-eyed, jaw working, hands opening and closing like—and then movement, and—

He’s snatching up the gauntlet from the bench and—and it’s closing around his hand even as he’s bringing it up, whine and clink of metal sliding home and circuits firing up and the repulsor in his palm is lighting up as he levels it at Bucky’s face and—

—and Steve is moving, thoughtless as a reflex, throwing himself forward and in between ‘em, like his puny carcass is gonna make any kinda obstacle if this turns into—

—and Bucky isn’t even _moving_ , isn’t making any move to—to duck, or defend himself, or—

_Stop_ —

Everything is stopped again, still again, Tony frozen in place with the gauntlet up, repulsor churning light and heat in the centre. He’s looking at Steve now, like he’s just remembered Steve’s here, and—

“You knew about this?”

Fuck. Jesus fuckin’ Christ. “Just now. I didn’t know, Tony.”

“And that, uh, lovers’ quarrel in the wings just now?” He flicks his head to point with his chin at the workshop doors, the foyer beyond—

Christ on a crutch. The workshop walls are glass; of course he fuckin’ noticed.

“Tony,” Steve starts and then—and then—

“ _You don’t gotta do this, Buck._ ” It’s Steve’s voice, coming from overhead, reproduced in a booming digital scale—JARVIS. JARVIS, monitoring every square inch of this Tower, heart rates and temperature signatures and vocal patterns.

Well, shit.

“You knew,” Tony is saying, hollow and pale like he’s emptied out, disemboweled. “You knew, and you weren’t gonna tell me.”

“Tony,” Steve says again, like some kind of dipshit, and he’s got his PhD in lies and bullshit but he’s got no fuckin’ clue what to say right now, what he can possibly say that will _fix this_ before—

There’s a whine that lifts toward a shriek and Steve can—the repulsor is glowing brighter, drawing energy and heat and he’s— _oh fuck_ —

And—heave of movement, thrown down and to the side and—and the scream of repulsor fire overhead, bang of—electrical short, sparks, metal crunching, falling—cold press of metal, Buck’s arm coiled over Steve’s head like a shield—

They’re down. They’re behind a workstation, Buck crouched across Steve’s carcass like a gargoyle, and the HK P30 is in his flesh hand and—something’s on fire. Some piece of lab equipment.

Tony shot at them. Fired a repulsor beam at Steve’s head. The only reason it’s not his face on fire right now is Bucky’s reflexes are faster’n anything human.

Jesus Christ—

“He _killed my parents_ ,” Tony is yelling and—and past the ringing in his ears Steve can hear footsteps, lurching forward, the high wail of an alarm klaxon starting to howl, and—

“It _wasn’t his choice_ , Tony,” Steve shouts, scrambling up—into a crouch, fingers and toes on the ground, keeping his head down. Buck has pivoted, putting his back to the metal of the workstation, gun up and—“Hydra—the Red Room—they made him their _puppet_.”

There’s a shriek of repulsor fire in reply, splintering on the workstation—Steve can feel the spilled-off heat against his skin and—and footsteps, coming forward and around to get a clear shot—

Buck is twisting, gun levelling to aim and—and Steve heaves himself forward, grabs Bucky’s gun arm and hauls it down.

There’s a frozen moment—Steve is staring at Buck, face inches away, and he can feel Bucky’s pulse jackhammering at his wrist. Buck is—eyes darting between Steve’s and over his shoulder, into the workshop, watching for Tony—

They can’t—they can’t return fire. Can’t go back at him. Tony’s not wearing one of his suits—means he’s just a guy in a T-shirt right now. A very fuckin’ dangerous guy in a T-shirt, but—but he’s just had a major operation a couple weeks ago and he’s still got surgical dressings jammed into his chest cavity and—

And he’s grieving, which means he’s stupid right now.

And he’s Steve’s friend.

_Fuck_.

And then—

Movement—Steve snaps to attention, to—silver grey movement across the lab, rounding the work bench—it’s one of Tony’s robots, and—

_Distraction_ —

—and Steve is turning, looking around for—

—and then he’s suddenly _lifting_ , seams of his hoodie biting at his shoulders and his breath tight where the collar is taut across his neck and then _weightless_ _oh fuck_ —

—down again, rolling, slapping the workshop floor to absorb some momentum—

He’s a good six feet across the workshop from where he started. Buck picked him up by the back of the hoodie and threw him—like picking up a kitten by the scruff—threw him outta harms way and—

Buck is on his knees, trying to get up, to get his feet under him, and Tony is standing back—good and back, outside of grabbing range—and firing short repulsor blasts—a hand, a knee, a shoulder—keeping him off balance, keeping him down—

“Tony, _stop_ ,” Steve screams. He’s scrabbling to get up again, hands shaking and knees shaking and—“Jesus Christ, _stop_. He wasn’t in control of his mind. Natasha told you, right? About Department X, the programming. You gotta know he didn’t choose any of this.”

Tony doesn’t stop—he’s glancing from Steve to Bucky and back, keeping ‘em both in his sights, and he’s firing again and again, short sharp pulses at Bucky’s centre mass, has gotta shout to be heard past the scream of the repulsor.

“What I know, Rogers, is that you’re a _lying liar who lies_. What I know is that you were gonna keep this from me, alongside every other secret in that rat trap of your conscience. What I know is that you’ve been a dishonest piece of work since day dot, so why the Hell should I believe you about _anything now_ —”

—and he’s pivoting, repulsor coming around to level at Steve’s face again—

—and Steve’s got time to see the whirl of light in the centre of his metal palm, and he oughta move or duck but all he can do is watch, like his feet have sunk into the glossy granite floor, like he’s anchored in place by the sheer weight of all his fuck ups, every friend he’s betrayed and confidence he’s failed and—

—and then Buck is there, grabbing Tony by the elbow—shoulder—twisting and hip check and then Tony’s folded into an arm bar, his repulsor pointed harmlessly at the floor, and Bucky is staring at Steve across Tony’s shoulder, wild-eyed.

“We gotta go,” Bucky rasps.

“Yeah,” Steve says, and then—

—squeal of light and heat and Tony’s fired his repulsor, straight at the floor, throwing him and Bucky apart, and they’re both—staggering, finding their footing—

Steve surges forward, lurching—almost falling—grabbing Buck by the shoulder and hauling and then Bucky is moving with him, running in a tangle like they’re in a three-legged race, curling his metal palm over Steve’s head and reefing him _down_ so they’re ducked behind a machine and—

Shriek of repulsor fire behind them—shearing off the machine and—and then Tony’s shouting: “JARVIS, lock it down,” and—

There are metal shutters dropping—along the length of the glass workshop walls—unfurling down from the roof—closing off the door, sealing away the world.

It’s solid plates, layered steel or something fancier, bulletproof and bomb-proof and fireproof and—

Two days ago Steve had seven dermal anchors running down the valley between his tits. He’s down to three now—Rumlow’s kick tore a few out, and Steve yanked another out himself, but—he’s still got a few hole cards.

One of ‘em is his parachute spell. One of ‘em is a general purpose hex.

He’s pressing fingertips to his chest—running straight at the wall of glass, the wall of steel, dropping lower every second, and—finding the nub of his lowest piercing through the fabric of his T-shirt, his hoodie. Letting the spell flow out, into his hand, the burn and ache of a hex blazing in his tendons and knuckles and—

—and _throw_ , heaving it out at the shutters, the electrical mechanism, the gears or circuits or whatever the Christ—

He doesn’t gotta know how it works. Breaking shit is so much easier than building.

The shutters grind to a stop with a long metal-on-metal scrape and whine and—there’s a couple feet still open at the bottom. A couple feet of daylight.

“Shit,” Tony barks, and—

“Fuck,” Bucky mutters, and then, “Go, go,” he’s telling Steve and—

He’s letting go of Steve’s shoulder and pouring on speed—and Zola’s knock-off serum worked a fuckin’ treat. He’s fast, fast as Steve when he’s Cap-shaped, crossing the workshop floor at ramming speed and—

—dropping, dropping flat like he’s sliding for home plate, booted heel first and the P30 down at his side, firing one round after another into the sealed glass door—

—and it’s bulletproof glass but it’s not designed for _this_ , the whole clip emptied into the one spot, the one square inch of glass and—

And then Buck slides into the glass heel-first and it shatters and he’s through, sliding through on sheer Goddamn momentum and—and there’s the musical peel of chunks of glass hitting the granite floor, the crunch of his metal elbow hitting the lowest edge of the steel shutter and—

—and he’s scrabbling, hauling himself the rest of the way through the gap, leaving chunks of skin and streaks of blood across the hard edges of the glass and—

Jesus wept, that’s one way to do it.

Steve’s running, head down—get low, get small, and he keeps wanting to grope himself for the quick-deploy veil spell anchor, the piercing that’s not there anymore—

—squeal of repulsor fire close by and he’s flinching, ducking further but—he’s okay, not hit—

And he’s—here, now—pitching forward onto his knees like a sinner felled by grace and heaving forward, into the breach—steel plate about an inch overhead, saw blade edges of glass teeth at either side—

—catching Bucky’s outstretched hand, reaching back through the litter of glass shards and blood and—

“ _Rogers_ ,” Tony screams, and Steve—stops, looks back.

Tony is—he’s standing, plain sight in the middle of the workshop floor, and he’s got his gauntlet out in front and a clear shot at Steve who is on all fours with his ass in the air like an idiot but—

But he’s not firing. He’s watching, jaw set and his face washed pale and he’s shaking, shaking, the light of his palm repulsor shifting in place like a firefly.

They’re both frozen for a heartbeat, staring, and then—

“He killed my Mom,” Tony says, raw as an open burn. Steve can only just hear him past the howl of the alarms overhead.

“I’m sorry,” Steve says, because Jesus Christ he’s so _fucking sorry_ but there’s no unringing this bell, no walking this back. His chest hurts like his lungs are collapsing on both sides, like his ribs are kicked to shards, and—

He can’t fix this. Not right now. Tony isn’t hearing him, doesn’t _trust_ him—and who in the fuck could blame him. The only way from here is forward.

Steve closes his eyes—he can’t look at Tony’s face, can’t—squeezes Bucky’s wrist, tight, convulsive. And Buck pulls, heaves him through the gap and—

Out. They’re in the foyer. The overhead lights are out, emergency lights in bright white pulsing with the wail of the alarm.

Bucky is—he oughta be on lookout, oughta be watching exits or—and instead he’s studying Steve, looking him over for injury or—gaze landing on Steve’s face and sticking there. His hand is still locked around Steve’s wrist, vice-tight.

He looks—the tac jacket held up okay—singed in a dozen places but intact, and—and there are copper-dark gouges into the fabric of his jeans, the meat of his thighs, bleeding free. His jaw is tense, lines standing out on his forehead and a notch of pain between the eyes.

Stricken. He looks stricken. Like someone’s just handed him the stack of newspaper archive Barnes family obituaries—

They’d given Winnie Barnes a good third of a page when she passed in ’65, as the mother of a local war hero, and the day Steve read it he’d had to shift over into his little body so he could get drunk as shit—

And it’s been a good five seconds, standing here, which is—a fucking geological age, in a combat scenario. And Bucky seems to be caught in—in whatever shit storm is going on in his head right now.

“Stairwell,” Steve says, and Buck blinks, eyes snapping into focus, and then they move.

Climbing stairs is an absolute bitch when your depth perception is fucked, which Steve learns when he almost eats shit on the first fuckin’ step—Buck catches him by the back of the hoodie mid-fall. Gauging how deep the stairs are, where to place your feet: that shit requires _two eyes_ , or it does if you wanna do it in any hurry—

—and they’re in a _fuckin’ hurry_ , running fast as Steve’s short Goddamn legs will carry him. They need out of this building before Tony thinks of a more sophisticated approach than firing a repulsor at the problem.

Up and up and—and Bucky’s still holding Steve by the back of the shirt, keeping him steady and shoving— _I’ll be the gas, but you’ve gotta steer_ —because it’s twenty floors up to the flight deck from Tony’s workshop, and Steve’s not asthmatic anymore and he ain’t a slouch but forty flights of stairs at a dead run can _get fucked_ , and—

Up and up and Steve’s lungs are clawing at the inside of his chest cavity and—and at every landing he can see the opaque black glass strip running across the concrete wall, chest height—JARVIS, everywhere, sensors and cameras watching every second of every day and—

Up and—Level 90, numbers painted in scream-bright yellow on the cement—flight deck.

Buck lets go of Steve’s shirt and puts on a burst of speed and hits the fire door metal shoulder first, ramming speed, and there’s a crunch of metal and concrete and wood, shearing, splintering, and they’re through—

Into—corridor, darkened, emergency lights pulsing and the alarms are still howling. White walls, marble underfoot.

The last time Steve came this way, he was taking the stairs down from the roof in the middle of the Battle of New York, coming after his father, after Loki, and now—

Steve takes point—he knows the way, has seen this route in his Goddamn dreams—down the corridor until it spills out into the entertainment deck, mirrored walls and the bar that wraps around a good quarter of the room and—across the sea of marble and down the tiered steps and—

—it woulda been about _there_ he’d lain, after he broke Loki’s compulsion and caught a spear through the chest wall for his troubles, bleeding out all over Tony’s nice marble. About _there_ that Ulfadhir—that Loki—stood for the last half hour of the battle, using Steve’s comms unit and a seeming of his voice to steer the fighting.

The glass doors out to the flight deck are closed, of course. Locked up tight, JARVIS controlled, bullet proof and repulsor proof and Chitauri Goddamn laser proof, because Tony went full paranoia on the redesign of this level after it was half-destroyed in the fighting, and that fact used to make Steve feel safe but now—

Steve pulls up the fires of unmaking from deep in his belly—and it comes in a rush, like fire blazing up a ridge line, like it’s been waiting for him. Like that channel in his body is worn deep and smooth—he’s laid hex after hex in the last week, and it feels like all he can fucking do anymore is wreck things.

He’s shaping the power in midstride, savage twists of his hands and snarling through the pain and—

Throws the hex. The doors jolt, hold, star-shaped splintering traced across one panel of glass.

Bulletproof, laser-proof, hex-proof—

“Son of a bitch,” Steve says, and conjures again—bigger, uglier, tracing spines like razor blades on the edges of the spell and _throws_ and—

The glass buckles, fractal splinters spiralling out across the surface but—holding, holding together.

“Jesus Christ on a cracker,” Steve spits, and—striding forward, forward, conjuring fast and ugly because they gotta _get gone_ and—and he’s using everything, his fear and grief and fury and exhaustion, the old flare of shame that still pops up outta the depths of his psyche every time he blasphemes out loud, pouring it into the hex as he shapes it between his hands and _throws_ —

The glass doors burst, bright and clean as new snow falling, a million-odd shards of glass showering across the flight deck and—

They’re out. Onto the flight deck, under the night sky, the muted sounds of New York coming up soft and distant from a hundred miles below. They’re out.

Across to the quinjet—glass crunching underfoot—

—up the ramp and Steve is mashing at the door close button with his fist, missing on the first pass because of this _fucking eye_ and then—the ramp is coming up, doors closing, and he turns and heads to the front of the jet, to the cockpit.

Buck is standing at the controls, toggling switches—firing up the fuel cells, the electronics. He half-turns when Steve gets there, grabs him by the shoulder and shoves him at the pilot’s seat. “Here. Get us in the air.”

Steve half-falls into the seat, grabbing the controls—he’s flown enough times to know what the preflight procedure is, but he ain’t any kind of pilot. Fumbles through the next couple switches to initiate the engines taking fuel, warming up their circuitry—can hear the engines starting to hum, soft and high-pitched, and—

Buck has gone to his knees, in between the pilot and co-pilot seats. “Buck?”

“Get us in the Goddamn air,” Bucky snaps, and he’s so much Sergeant Barnes right at this second that Steve almost fires off a salute, but he needs both hands for the controls, ramping up the power to the engines and angling the flaps for a double-time takeoff.

The hum of the quinjet engines warming up builds, dropping in pitch, vibrating through metal and fibreglass, into the bones of Steve’s pelvis.

Buck rips one of the metal cover panels away from next to Steve’s right knee, reaching into the guts of—it’s all circuit boards and wires and—

“Kinda important stuff in there, Buck,” Steve says, and—

“We in the air yet?” Bucky answers, crisp as a new dollar bill, and Steve—fuck, Jesus—

—looks up to see the Stark security fellas swarming out onto the flight deck, splitting left and right to circle the jet—

Outta time. The engines ain’t exactly warmed up yet but SHIELD engineered these jets to survive a little rough handling.

“Hold on,” Steve hollers, and then he heaves back on the yoke and hits all thrusters and—

“ _Fuck_.”

Steve can just hear Bucky’s yelp past the scream of the engines, an ungodly mechanical howl like some shithead who doesn’t know what the Hell he’s doing is in the pilot’s seat, and—Jesus Christ Almighty, _we have liftoff_ and—

And Steve is slammed into the back of the seat, pinned by the hand of God, can only just reach the yoke from here and—and that means he’s pulling the yoke back _further_ , steepening the angle of their climb and—

Buck is braced against the floor, fingers of his metal hand punched into the metal of the control panel and teeth bared and—

Need to level out before they hit a Goddamn commercial 747. Fuck Steve’s short-ass tiny person arms, fuck this jet and this seat and—

Steve claws his way forward, scrabbling for—for the thrusters, nudging at ‘em with bled-numb fingertips—just—just enough to ease back the power, enough to slow down a Goddamn hair. Not so much they fuckin’ stall and fall outta the sky like a dead duck, please Christ _God Almighty—_

Slowing, slowing, and Steve— _need a fuckin’ booster seat for this thing_ —heaves himself up again, pushing against gravity, enough to get his palm over the yoke and ease it forward and—

And they’re levelling. They’re levelling off, easing and—

One hand on the thrusters, one hand on the yoke. Flyin’ level. Easy as pie.

Jesus fuckin’ Christ—and breathe _out_.

“Fuck,” Bucky says again, firm and precise like that one cuss is a full mission debrief and the punctuation on the end. Lets go of the access panel with his metal hand—there’s an almost musical squeal of metal on metal—and reaches into the guts again with his right hand, back on task.

“On my mark,” Bucky says, “you’re gonna cloak us.”

Cloak—oh, right. Not Steve’s kinda invisibility spell—the SHIELD kind. Cloaking mechanism for the quinjet is—it’s that switch up there.

Steve puts his hand over it, ready for Buck’s word, but—but there’s not a whole lotta point to it. “Buck, they’ve got our IFF. JARVIS has got this plane on lock. Even if they can’t see us, they’re gonna know where this jet goes, down to the last square inch.”

And then maybe Tony sends a suit after them, or—or Colonel Rhodes could probably get F22s scrambled on his say-so.

They’re gonna have to get outside the city, dump the jet and steal a car or something, get dark—Steve’s staring out the cockpit window, lookin’ out for—they’re up in the clouds, milky grey against the black of the night sky, and—and Buck’s not replying, not sayin’ nothing.

Steve looks away, looks down, meets Bucky’s gaze.

He’s elbow deep in the bank of electronics, staring up at Steve, and his face is—he’s brow down and jaw working, the kinda look he gets when he thinks Steve’s dumber’n two short planks but doesn’t want to be the first one to say it.

“Mark,” he says instead, and Steve hits the cloaking switch, and at the same time Buck’s elbow shifts like he’s just done something in the guts of the control panel, and—

The lights on—it’s about the lower middle of the control panel, all the displays and switches for comms and signalling—the lights cut out, and then come back on and pulse, slow and regular, dimmed. Still working, but—“What did we just do?”

“Killed the IFF,” Bucky answers, pulling his arm back out of the bank. “And a couple other systems. We’re cloaked, we’re off radar, we’re dark. Broadcasting nothin’. We just dropped off the face of the Earth.”

He pauses for a second, looks away, mouth working and—and he looks tired. Sad. “Gotta keep eyes out for airliners, other planes. They’re not gonna know we’re here.”

That’s—this is… This is _extremely fucking useful_ , but—but how the Hell did Buck know how to do that? He was a car mechanic in a past life but—but never a pilot.

Hydra have had him doing wet works for most of the last decade, so how…

“Bucky,” Steve says.

Buck makes a low noise in reply, somewhere between a hum and a grunt. Gets up off the floor and moves towards the rear of the plane, slow and graceless like he’s hiding a bleeding gut wound. He doesn’t turn to look at Steve. The fall of his dark hair hides his face, his eyes, his expression, but his body language is speakin’ whole volumes plus appendices.

“You learned that one with Hydra,” Steve says.

Bucky—stops. He’s up the back now, next to the cargo shelves, gear lockers. Drops his head down a notch lower. Doesn’t say nothin’.

“That means Hydra was using SHIELD quinjets to run their operations?” Steve asks, and—

“Quinjets,” Bucky rasps. “Weapons, materiel, intelligence, data. SHIELD personnel. SHIELD funding.”

Lotsa fingers in lotsa pies—Mother Mary, fulla grace, every time Steve thinks he understands just how deep the rot goes, he turns around and loses another shred of innocence. Hydra—if their reach goes that far, that deep—

It won’t be enough to share all SHIELD’s dirty laundry. Hydra will—they’ll have boltholes and bunkers and back up plans all over the Goddamn world. All of SHIELD’s caches, their hidden bases—gotta assume at least half of them are Hydra now, and no one—

No one but Fury would have any way of knowing where the Hell they all are.

And Fury’s in a coma. Christ only knows if he’ll ever come out of it.

God Almighty, what a clusterfuck.

Bucky is—he’s still standing with his back to Steve, head down. Hands in fists at his sides. His breathing is slow, controlled, sniper steady. If he’s—if he knows that much, then he’s gotta be remembering, more and more all the time. Remembering Steve, and Brooklyn, two dumb kids, but also—remembering Hydra, and the Red Room. What they did to him. What they used him for.

“Buck—” Steve starts, stops, breathes.

Starts again.

“I ain’t gonna pretend I know what it’s like in your head, right now. Putting the pieces back together. Maybe some of the pieces you don’t want. Maybe some of ‘em don’t ever come back right. But—whatever else happens, Buck, whatever other pieces turn up—I’ve got your six, always. We’ll figure it out, together."

Bucky is silent for a long while, his hands slowly opening and closing into fists again. Steve faces front and watches the sky, clouds, night darkening overhead—they’re bearing south, blind and thoughtless, no direction and no plans, and he watches Buck in the curve of the glass, his reflection.

And then Bucky shifts, half-turns, just enough to see the edge of his face. “You can’t do this, Steve.”

“What? Can’t fly worth a damn? You’re not wrong,” Steve says, pitching it jovial, something off the Spangled circuit, like his gut ain’t running cold as Arctic pack ice in the belly of winter, and—

“You can’t come with me,” Bucky says. “You got—you got friends, you got a life back there. People who care about you. You can’t throw ‘em all over for one brain-damaged piece of shit.”

Steve is shaking his head, chest pulling tight and close like he’s just caught a face full of November wind and his asthma is playing games, but Buck keeps talking, low and flat and—

“We’ll—we can stop. Someplace quiet. I’ll get out, find a car, keep running dark, but—but you gotta go back. You got me out, got me clear of Hydra. Gave me a head start. I’ll run, I won’t let ‘em take me, but you gotta have your life back.”

“I don’t _want it_ ,” Steve spits, and—and he’s slapping at the controls, autopilot on—hope to Christ the proximity sensors give ‘em enough warning before a fuckin’ A380 flies into ‘em, but he can’t—can’t just fuckin’ _sit there_ like he’s back in the fuckin’ dunce corner, he’s gotta—

—reefs his ass outta the pilot’s seat and turns and stalks down the length of the jet, and his voice is coming thick, wolfish, and he can’t _help it_ , can’t—

“I don’t want a single Goddamn bit of that life,” he’s snarling, and Buck is turning more, turning to face him, shoulders down and face—drawn, pale and pained like he’s fist-fought God and lost. Gaze fixed on Steve’s elbow.

Steve hauls up to stop in front of him, says: “I was fighting and killing for _Hydra,_ in a flimsy fucking drag costume called SHIELD. I was lying to every single person I ever met—none of the people in that Tower _know_ me, and that’s not their fault. It’s on me. I’m a lying piece of shit. We can be pieces of shit together. I’m _not leaving you_.”

“I _killed him_ , Steve,” Bucky answers, and he sounds raw as skin flayed from muscle and fat, words pared thin like his throat is vice-tight. “Stark. Your friend. He was alive, after the crash. Crawled his way outta the car. I held him by the scruff and hit him in the face until he stopped moving. I killed his wife.”

Steve’s gotta close his eyes and just—just fuckin’ breathe, for a minute. Can’t stop—he’s seeing Howard, Howard Stark like he was during the War, sharp as a tack and funny as Hell and always moving, working, like his hands and feet couldn’t keep up with how fast his brain was ticking over. He’d been charming, and too damn generous, but—it was cultivated generosity, conscious: he’d grown up the son of immigrants in New York, same as Steve. Built an empire from the ground up outta ideas.

He’d been—brilliant, and imperfect, alive like he was gonna distil every drop of nectar outta every moment of life he’d been given.

And he’d died in the gravel by the side of a quiet road, brains leaking outta his ears, because Goddamn Department X willed it.

Because of this man right here, only—

“He said my name,” Bucky breathes. “I didn’t know what it meant.”

Steve bites down hard on the inside of his cheek to keep from mewling like a kicked pup. Breathes in and out, slow and controlled, and then he opens his eyes, says: “It wasn’t your fault, Buck.”

“It was my hands,” Bucky says, and he plants his metal hand on the door of a storage locker, staring fixed ahead. “Wasn’t anybody else there.”

“And you wouldn’ta been there either, if the Red Room hadn’t put you there,” Steve rasps, voice fraying mid-sentence like strands of metal wire shearing under strain. “They ripped every Goddamn thing but death and obedience outta your head and put a gun in your hands. I’m not—”

He breaks off, closes his eyes and swallows hard, starts again.

“I’m not gonna tell you how to get square with that. With knowing what your hands did. With remembering it. But I know it wasn’t your fault, because it wasn’t your choice. Because you’ve never once made a choice to hurt any—any civilians, any kids or—you mighta been a soldier, but you were a good man, Barnes. I _know you_.”

“I ain’t him,” Bucky says, and his right hand comes up to the rat’s nest of his hair, fingers digging at the back of his skull. “I ain’t—I don’t know how to be Bucky, I don’t—don’t know how to be a good man. How to be a _man_ , for fuck’s sakes.”

The words come fast, choked thin: “I got nothin’, I—all my protocols are failing, I need—need orders, maintenance, somethin’—somethin’, I…”

“Buck,” Steve says, and his chest hurts like his heart is trying to shove straight out through his sternum. His hands are shaking as they come up, catch at Bucky’s right hand and curl around the fingers, pull away from where he’s clawed into his scalp so he doesn’t—doesn’t hurt himself, doesn’t—and then he’s reaching, cupping Buck’s cheek with one hand.

Rasp of beard under the heel of his palm, starting to soften as the hair curls back on itself.

Bucky goes still. Looks Steve in the—in the eyebrow. It’s almost eye contact.

“Buck,” Steve says again. “You’re him. I know you.”

And then he closes his eyes and takes a breath and starts to hum.

The first time Steve heard Bucky’s song, he was a snot-nosed eight-year-old shithead, sprawled on the dirt behind O’Brien’s butcher shop, and Bucky had just waded into what was gonna be the first of a whole lotta fights to save Steve’s bacon.

It was wild, bright, a child’s song without the layers of subtlety and shading that get lacquered over the soul as you grow. Brass, big and bold like somethin’ outta Harlem, but it lilted and sobbed like an Old Country ballad.

The last time Steve heard Bucky’s song, it was—he couldn’ta known it would be the last time. If he’d known—

It was 1945, and it was night, ink black and colder than Satan’s ass crack, a little over a mile above sea level in the Austrian Alps. Buck was on first watch when Steve slipped outta the tent, veiled and hidden, on his way out to circle the camp, cover ‘em all in a couple layers of veil spells, and—

He’d been veiled but Buck still—shifted, line of his spine going straight as a ruler and—and he slowly stood, uncoiled from his seat—back to the fire—his Colt in his right hand and finger hovering against the guard and—

—and Steve stopped, and watched, wondering what the Hell Buck heard, or saw, and—

He _listened_. Listened, real close—not with the useless ears on the side of his head, listened with his extra fuckin’ sense and—and there was the night music, mountain music, stone and snow and the scrubby bushes hanging onto the rock face. There was Bucky’s song, and the Commandos, slowed and slurred with sleep.

Distantly, the lunatic spike and wail of—something small being killed, sounded like, a vole or something and—and owl music, and maybe that’s what Bucky heard—

He’d been more than human, even then. Zola’s knock-off serum working through his bones and blood and every cell, and Steve was too Goddamn stupid to see it happening in front of his Goddamn face.

Bucky’s song, then—it was still brazen, brass notes sliding and wailing but—slower, drawn out, less the slap of trumpets and more the low mourning of the saxophone and—and the cry of seagulls, high and rasping. The muted downbeat at the end of each phrase that was—it was a metallic slide, well-oiled and tightly machined.

Coulda been the churn of a piston in the belly of a car engine. Coulda been a round entering the chamber of a Johnson rifle.

There’s a lot that can’t be communicated with humming, with the limits of Steve’s voice box. He gives it his best anyway, pitching up with the seagull calls, sighing out the lull beat, and—and he’s gotta keep his eyes closed, gotta keep his head down so Buck can’t see his face because he feels like the biggest fuckin’ idiot in the world but this is—this is all he’s got.

Memories can be burnt away. Stories can be spun outta fiction and lies. Goddamn DNA can be copied in fuckin’ test tubes, photographs can be edited, but—but you can’t fake soul. And—

And Buck is silent, quiet as an empty grave, dead still like he’s spun from marble, and—Steve can hear Bucky’s song, the song of him now, the hopelessly distorted echo of the same tune. Howl of train over steel tracks and the shriek of saw teeth biting through bone and—and he lines up the song he’s humming so it layers over, layers under, weaves together, what was then and what is now, and—

—and then he hears it, the faintest radar blip of a seagull cry hitching through the howl of Buck’s song, and—

And Bucky sighs, long and carefully controlled, and Steve opens his eyes, looks up.

Bucky is crying, silent, his breath coming slow and sniper-steady, just—if Steve couldn’t see the tears striping down from his closed eyelids, disappearing into his beard, there’d be no way of knowing. His hands are closed into fists, jaw set like he’s wounded, biting down on a belt right before somebody cauterizes the bleed.

Steve blinks hard, draws breath, keeps humming, and—and the tune folds and starts over again at the top and—and as it does, Steve can hear the echo of brass, humming warmth under the steel of Bucky’s song and—

Bucky jolts like he’s been slapped in the face, head turning and eyes flying open and—and then he’s sagging, knees folding like an old camp table, and Steve’s grabbing for him, catching a strap of the well-worn tac jacket and—

Bucky’s hand comes up to circle Steve’s wrist—his left hand, weapon hand, fingers smooth and ghost-warm with stolen body heat and—and then his hand springs away again like he’s touched a live wire and—

He’s turning as he falls, so it’s almost graceful, twisting so when his knees give way his ass lands on the bench seat that runs up the middle of the plane. He’s shaking his head, still mute, voiceless, eyes open and blind, darting from side to side.

“Bucky,” Steve says, puts a trembling hand to Buck’s cheek and—

“ _No_ ,” Bucky mouths, and Steve lifts his hand clear again but—but Bucky’s moving, faster’n Steve’s eye can follow, catching Steve by the wrist again and—and he’s pressing Steve’s palm to his face again, leaning into it, careful like he’s holding somethin’ spun from sugar.

Steve can feel a muscle in Bucky’s jaw, ticking under the heel of his palm. Can feel his breath against the pulse point in Steve’s wrist.

“Buck,” Steve says. “Sweetheart.” And Bucky closes his eyes, snapped shut like he’s bracing against pain, and—and his hand spasms, lifts away from Steve’s skin again.

Christ, he’s so—he’s fuckin’ _starving_ , he’s been starved for seventy years and he’s Goddamn forgotten how to—how to _touch_ , and to be touched, without threat, without violence.

Steve fuckin’ _aches_ , aches from the soul on out, like his ribs are butterflying open from the inside. He bites his lip— _forward, more, now_. Knees his way up onto the bench so he’s straddling Bucky’s thighs, hovered above his lap.

“This okay?”

“ _Da_ ,” Bucky says, low. His eyes stay closed. “Yes.”

“Bucky,” Steve says again, and—

“I ain’t _him_. I can’t be him.”

“I _know_ ,” Steve says, shifting his hand up Bucky’s jawline to hook his fingers into the hair at his nape. “Bucky, I know you can’t. I ain’t the Steve Rogers who went into the ice, either. Made myself crazy for two Goddamn years trying—I can’t do it. I dream in wolf, now. I can’t be that kid anymore—but I’m still somebody. I swear to God, _you’re_ somebody. A person, a soul. The best man I ever knew, _a stór_. I will _never_ quit on you.”

Bucky’s face is—there’s pain in the lines of his brow, sorrow in the downward pull of his mouth, jaw working. His eyes are—Steve can see them shifting behind his eyelids, darting from side to side like he’s ransacking the inside of his head for answers, and then—

And then he’s moving, right arm coming up and he’s—his hand lands on Steve’s side, over the ribs, cautious like he’s opening a bomb casing, and Steve half-braces to be pushed away, to re-establish some distance, only—

Only Buck’s hand doesn’t push. And then he’s breathing out, dropping his head forward, so his forehead is against Steve’s temple and—

And Steve can feel the tremor in Buck’s hand. Can feel Bucky’s head resting against his, heavier as he sags into it, like some pulled-taut wire inside him is slowly sliding loose.

Steve—breathes, and holds, and—and then he puts his other arm around Buck’s middle, slow and easy, and—and no one dies, so he eases a fraction deeper, settling more of his weight across Bucky’s thighs, clawing his blunt fingertips into the Kevlar over Buck’s shoulder blades.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Bucky smells like shampoo and hot metal, burnt denim, blood and sweat.

He’s alive—somehow they’re both _fuckin’ alive_ —and he’s here.

“End of the line, Bucky. I’ve meant it, every damn time I’ve said it. Did you?”

Buck—twitches, once, like a fly-stung horse, and then—and then he shudders, tension ratcheting back down again. He’s closed his right hand, fisting the cloth of Steve’s T-shirt, and—

—and then he’s nodding, _yes_ , hair rasping against Steve’s temple.

Well then. That makes things real simple.

Steve turns his head, brushes a kiss on the snarled hair above Bucky’s ear, closes his eyes.

They’re both just—just breathing, and Steve is hairs-on-end aware of everyplace they’re touching—heads resting together, and Steve’s hand at Bucky’s nape; Steve’s hand on Bucky’s ribs and Buck mirroring him, exact like he’s measured it up with a slide ruler.

God help them both if he’s decided to try and relearn humanity by studying Steve, imprint like some kinda baby duck—Steve can only just manage _human_ on good days.

They’re both—Steve is a wolf and a soldier and a spy and a whole pile of neuroses stacked up inside a trench coat, pretending to be a person. Bucky is seven-or-so decades of programming and a handful of memories and a Goddamn metal arm.

They’re about as fuckin’ cuddly as a pair of Kalashnikovs, all careful tension and hard angles—but this is them. Who they are, now.

And everything is fucked beyond all recognition, and—and Tony Stark wants Bucky strung up, ain’t any fonder of Steve. SHIELD is writhing, bleeding out. Hydra is Goddamn everywhere. It’s a fuckin’ nightmare, and—

Steve’s just spent two years building alliances and resources and strength so—so that when the Titan Thanos comes, with his armies, maybe the world will be okay, only—

—only that’s all burnt down to the Goddamn ground, now.

Steve struck the match himself.

And—still. Ain’t like he’s never lost everything before. Lost everyone. At least—at least this time he’s not doing it alone.

“Bucky. Will you please fly this plane before I kill us?”

Bucky breathes out, long and slow, and then he nods, opens his eyes. He’s lookin’—settled. Alert, lights on.

Steve climbs offa his lap and steps back, gives Buck room to get up.

Bucky prowls forward to the front of the plane, stops with one hand on the pilot’s seat. Toggles off the autopilot. He’s looking down across the controls when he speaks, rasping like he’s just smoked three packs of cigarettes one after another. “What’s our heading?”

Christ, but that’s a good question. Steve’d been fixed so hard on getting ‘em the Hell outta New York that—that the question of where in God’s name to go _instead_ kinda just…

Where the Hell can they go?

Stark, Hydra, they’ve both got reason enough to wanna hunt Steve and Buck down. Anyplace with street cameras and surveillance, anyplace with ATM cameras and folks with mobile phones—anyplace they can be spotted digitally, they ain’t gonna be safe. Steve’s got no illusions about that—Hydra will have embedded personnel in governments all over the world, and there’s no reason to believe the current purge is gonna find them all. And there’s not a system in the world that JARVIS can’t hack, given enough time and processing power.

Steve can veil them, and conjure illusions, but—but one bit of bad luck, one asshole who zigs when he shoulda zagged on the street and bumps into ‘em and—and there go illusions, seemings, safety. No, they’ve gotta go someplace way the Hell off the grid.

“Say,” Steve begins. “You speak Kalaallisut, Buck?”

“I—no,” Bucky says, after a couple seconds, and he’s turned enough to look Steve, blinking, wolf-grey eyes darting like they do when he’s sorting through the rubble in his head.

“How about Danish? _Taler du dansk_?”

“ _Ja_ ,” Bucky answers, blinks hard like he’s startled himself, continues: “ _Jeg taler dansk_. Apparently.”

“You’ll do fine,” Steve says. “Take us north and east, sweetheart, and don’t stop until you see ice.”

Bucky blinks again, looks Steve in the eye for a long moment, and then—and then he nods, and settles into the pilot’s seat. And Steve slips into the co-pilot’s chair, breathes out, starts pulling up the coordinates for Greenland.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's a wrap on Arc Four.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has been reading along--it lights up my so-called soul to get your feedback and kudos and to know that you've been reccing to folks, or reading to folks, or making art or coming up with conspiracy boards or otherwise engaged with this 'verse. Much love to you all, from the bottom of my so-called heart.
> 
> Where to from here? Arc Five is in the works. Still a lot of story to tell, a lot of threads to untangle. So posting will be on hiatus until I get Arc Five in the can. Please be assured, there will be an Arc Five--this story has embedded into my nervous system and I don't get to stop writing until the whole thing is told. (Please, send help.) So maybe pop a bookmark or a subscription on the series so you get alerted when the next part begins to post.
> 
> Again, a million thank yous. Your lunatic rantings (in reply to my lunatic rantings) drip-feeding into my inbox make me grin like a lunatic.
> 
> Take care until Arc Five, and I'll see you all in the comments. <3


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